Tech Forum

The newsletter help documentation provides an explanation of the roles/rights for administrator and publisher. What is not clear in the administrator explanation is whether the administrators added by a default administrator can add or remove other administrators.

If a limitation exists on these added administrators as is done in the calendar then it would be nice to know this and have it documented for reference. I have not been able to test whether this limitation exists or not. Can anyone verify whether this limitation exists or not?

The documentation should probably delineate between "default admin" and just "admin".

I can confirm it... I added my wife as an administrator, and then when she logged in, she was able to add and delete other administrators, including deleting herself, at which point the page wouldn't refresh because she no longer had access Had to go back to the main view of the newsletter from there, where she no longer had an admin link.

failproof wrote:...she was able to add and delete other administrators...

By "other administrators" do you mean not to include default administrators?

A good clarifying question... What she can do when I have added her as an administrator is add new users as either publisher or administrator, and delete any users who appear in the users list, whether they appear as publisher or administrator.

I was showing as an individual in the list as an administrator (** just a side note, but not really important, I don't remember adding myself that way, but perhaps some carry over from the beta version - I say that because all the test posts I added when it was still in beta still existed once they added Newsletter as one of the available tools on LDS.org. Perhaps that version was different than what is now the newer beta site. Either way, I had to delete all my useless test posts once it went live on LDS.org) ...so as I was saying, I was listed as an idividual, not by calling, as an administrator. Using my wife's newly aquired admin access, I was able to delete me from the list of users. That, however, did not remove my admin permissions by calling as a Website Administrator, so I must assume that any default admins to the site, who don't show up in the user list but have permissions based on their calling as a clerk, etc. can not be removed from admin permissions by any administrator, default or otherwise.

failproof wrote:A good clarifying question... What she can do when I have added her as an administrator is add new users as either publisher or administrator, and delete any users who appear in the users list, whether they appear as publisher or administrator.

That's correct, which answers the question posed in the original post. And of course, the term "administrator" in this context refers only to manually-added administrators. Default administrators don't appear in the list, and cannot be deleted anyway.

failproof wrote:I was showing as an individual in the list as an administrator (** just a side note, but not really important, I don't remember adding myself that way, but perhaps some carry over from the beta version

I'm pretty sure you were on the individual list as an administrator because you (or some other administrator) added yourself to the list during the beta. In my experience, never during the beta did anyone appear on the list without being added manually. There has never been any checking to see if the person being added was already a default administrator.

failproof wrote:I say that because all the test posts I added when it was still in beta still existed once they added Newsletter as one of the available tools on LDS.org. Perhaps that version was different than what is now the newer beta site. Either way, I had to delete all my useless test posts once it went live on LDS.org)

We were warned at the beginning of the beta test that all content (posts, administrators, categories) would carry forward from the beta to the official release; that's why you had to manually delete your posts. Here's an excerpt from that original post:

SorensonMi wrote:Feel free to explore the Newsletter app in as many ways as you like. We will retain the articles, categories, and other settings that you enter. Content will not be reset or deleted when the application becomes official. However, you can always delete articles that you create.

failproof wrote:I was listed as an idividual, not by calling, as an administrator. Using my wife's newly aquired admin access, I was able to delete me from the list of users. That, however, did not remove my admin permissions by calling as a Website Administrator, so I must assume that any default admins to the site, who don't show up in the user list but have permissions based on their calling as a clerk, etc. can not be removed from admin permissions by any administrator, default or otherwise.

That's correct, and is consistent with the way default administrators are handled in all the applications -- they have their permissions based on their calling, and so the only way to remove those permissions is to remove them from their callings.

The Calendar has the nice feature that lists all the administrators, whether default or manually added, and makes it clear which is which. In my opinion, that's a nice model to follow for all the applications. It removes the need to do additional detective work to determine if someone has the right standard calling, and it lets you know everyone who can administer the system by looking in one place.