Some MiniInt policies

[Ari Rahikkala]

Not much of a formal doc, just clarifying some... things. If it turns out I have to clarify more things in the future I'll make a closed sticky of them.

Titles

Titles as in that text between your online/offline indicator and avatar. The ones that are somewhat visible in Shireroth are Kaiser, Steward, Praetor, and, a new one I just put in, Arbiter. Plus there's Denizen and Honorary Citizen which some random people have that I might as well leave in for onw. Unless there's a lot of interest in increased fanciness I don't think I'm going to be adding new special ranks any time soon. The reason is that with our phpbb3 installation adding a title involves adding a special rank and then picking that rank for the user in user administration. It's the kind of task that's not terribly time-consuming but that I know I'd be annoyed with and keep forgetting to do if I had to do it for a lot of people (read: the ministers, the dukes, etc.).

So, as a policy, unless there's a lot of interest, I'm going to provide titles only for the Kaiser, Steward, Praetor and Arbiter. It seems a reasonable compromise to me as it provides useful information to people who haven't been around lately while not being much work for me. Besides, all of those titles are mutually exclusive (well, nothing says you can't be both Kaiser and Steward, but who'd do that?) so there won't be conflicts regarding which title to confer to a person.


Groups

I found groups for titles that confer complicated permissions - most commonly, moderatorship on more than one forum - plus various things that actually are groups. If a title is generally only given to a single person that only confers special permissions on a single forum, I prefer to just give the permissions to that user directly. The reason is that I don't want there to be too many groups. phpbb3's interface is designed to manage only a few groups, really - it gets time-consuming to look up groups in dropdowns when the groups list is really long.