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Does anyone use Custom Role to Segment their members?

  • 7 September 2021
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Here is an example of context. We have a Certification Program where people can take a class and an exam and get certified on our platform. When they do, they’ll get access to join a private group and also will get a badge on their profile. But obviously, we need them to register and log into the community first, and we need to know that they are certified. 

So… would giving them a Custom Role that has the same permissions as our regular users be a way to segment this group of certified individuals and distinguish them from non-certified customers? 

My concern is adding unneeded Custom Roles that don’t actually differ in permissions per se, but are just a way to distinguish various segments from one another. I feel like that can get real messy real fast. 

 

TL;DR - Does anyone have any advice on how to best segment various users in the community other than Custom Role? 

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Best answer by Ditte 10 September 2021, 09:18

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Hey @tiffany.oda - I’m just getting started so I don’t have any advice - but wanted to share that I have a similar use case, both for certified users and for new users. 

Following this thread with interest!

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[...]

So… would giving them a Custom Role that has the same permissions as our regular users be a way to segment this group of certified individuals and distinguish them from non-certified customers? 

[...]

That is the best way at the moment, as we can’t change the primary roles.

I would add that, while I agree that several custom roles can be messy, it won’t get more messy than you allow it to be. By that I mean that you can prevent a lot of headache down the road by making sure you have a good naming convention for them :)

We use custom roles to indicate customers vs. non-customers and some internal roles. You can set some of these via login (e.g. the SSO method used) or set as well via API. Agree naming and automated efforts are key to keeping it from getting messy. 

Hi @tiffany.oda We also use custom roles for this. It helps me search the user list, and change ranks and permissions in some cases, but I also sometimes use them as you mention, with exactly the same permissions as a regular user, just as an internal label. 

I can see much more potential for this feature when it’s used this way, especially for automation and reporting.

  1. Custom roles for reporting. Exported user reports don’t separate custom roles from other roles, so I can’t sort a spreadsheet by custom role without a lot of other manual work ahead of time to ignore the other roles. I added a custom profile field (user type) for this sorting reason, but it’s essentially a duplicate of the custom roles, which I use for rank change and some permissions.
  2. Custom roles in analytics dashboards. I would love to have custom role stats included in my dashboard, so I can see how many users of each type are joining, active, etc. Right now I do this manually (as discussed above).
  3. Custom role as trigger for automated actions. For example, I want to automate welcome emails per user type (ie, per custom role) which isn’t possible at the moment.

...so to your original question, using custom profile fields is another way to label users, but I don’t recommend it because they are difficult to edit after you set them up. When you add a new one or edit one, it really creates a mess in your existing users that you have to go in and manually edit, and also sometimes creates a mess in the reports. I found that until now the extra value they add in being able to sort has overcome this, but I’ve definitely spent several tedious hours sorting out user profiles and if I ever have to make another change I may abandon them.

Curious if you are doing anything else with custom roles, or have found any hacks/workarounds to use them for this purpose?

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