Community roles & permissions
Hand someone the moderation queue without handing them your settings — build roles for your community and decide exactly what each one can reach.
A community role decides what someone can do inside your community. The person you brought in to keep the feed clean doesn't need to edit your billing settings, and the person writing your courses doesn't need to ban members.
Roles are built in Settings → People → Roles, and given to people from the member list or their profile.
Before you start
- Building, editing and giving out roles needs the Assign roles permission. No built-in role carries it, so in practice it's the community owner's job — the Roles tab doesn't show for anyone without it.
- The person must already be a member of your community — roles are given from their card in the member list or from their profile.
Note
Community roles are separate from project roles. A project role decides what a collaborator can do in the Genesis builder — pages, publishing, payments. A community role decides what they can do inside the community itself. Someone can hold one, both, or neither.
Built-in roles
Every community starts with four roles. They are ordinary roles, not fixtures — rename them, re-tick them, delete them.
| Role | Best for | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | A partner you trust with the whole community | Everything except assigning roles |
| Moderator | Keeping the feed clean and letting people in | Reports, hiding posts, bans, restrictions, viewing and approving members |
| Editor | Whoever writes your courses and resources | Creating, editing and deleting courses, resources and videos; viewing members; seeing what Amplify can share |
| Host | Running streams, calls and the schedule | Creating and running live events, muting and removing participants, viewing members |
Admin covers everything except one tick: Assign roles. That stays with you. Anyone who can grant a role can grant their own, which would make every other limit on them a suggestion.
Building your own
Settings → People → Roles → New Role gives you the whole permission list as a checkbox tree, grouped and ordered the same way your settings menu is — so you're reading the same map you already navigate.
Each role shows how many permissions it carries out of the total, so a glance tells you whether a role is narrow or nearly everything.
A community can hold up to 20 roles.
The full list
Nine areas, 39 individual permissions.
Community settings
| Permission | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Name, about & branding | The community's identity |
| Theme | Colours and appearance |
| Channels & categories | The structure of the feed |
| Custom emojis | The emoji set |
| Access groups & privacy | Who can see the community at all |
| Legal pages | Terms and privacy — the text members accepted when they joined |
| Navigation & sidebar | What appears in the menu |
| SEO & social preview | How the community looks when shared |
| Custom scripts | Arbitrary JavaScript on every page |
| Promo banner | The banner above the feed |
| View analytics | Growth, content and member reports |
| Edit levels, badges & reward rules | Levels and point rewards, Member Blaze milestones |
| Award points & badges by hand | Running Member Blaze draws. Points feed levels, and levels can gate posting and channels |
Content
| Permission | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Courses & challenges | Create, edit, delete |
| Resources & opportunities | Create, edit, delete |
| Videos | Create, edit, delete |
| Review reports | The moderation queue |
| Hide & remove posts and comments | Reaches every member's posts, not only their own |
| Ban & unban members | Removes their access to the whole community |
| Restrictions | Limits on what a member may do |
| Live & events | View, create and run streams and events |
| Mute & remove participants | Any call in the community, not only ones they started |
Deleting a course is a real grant and worth a thought before you hand it out: a deleted course can't be brought back.
People
| Permission | What it opens |
|---|---|
| View the member list | Who is in the community |
| Approve & decline requests | The join queue |
| Remove members | Ends their membership. Their posts stay — see Removing a member |
| Assign roles | Owner-only in practice — see above |
Add-ons
These only appear if your community has the add-on. A tick for a feature you don't have would be a promise nothing can keep, so the editor doesn't offer it.
| Permission | What it opens |
|---|---|
| View what can be shared (Amplify) | What can be shared outward |
| Bring in & sync content from another community (Amplify) | Copies courses, posts and licences in from another community |
| Amplify settings | What this community shares outward |
| View licences | Licences issued and held |
| Issue, approve & revoke licences | A licence hands another community one of your courses |
| Linked product & access tags (licences) | Which product a licence grants, and the access it carries |
Giving someone a role
Open the … menu on the person's card in the member list, or their profile, and choose Assign role (Assign a role on a profile) or Change role.
The picker shows each role with the number of permissions it carries, marks the one they hold now, and doesn't apply anything until you press Save — so you can see what you're about to do and stop.
To take authority away, pick No role.
Caution
Nobody is narrowed automatically. Moderators you appointed before roles existed still hold full admin access — every permission, assigning roles included — until you give them a role. Assigning one is what decides; an update never takes access away on its own.
What stays with the owner
The community owner always holds everything and is never limited by a role. Assigning roles is theirs alone. Everything else on this page can be delegated.
Things worth knowing
- Nobody can change their own role unless they're the community owner.
- Editing a role reaches everyone holding it, immediately. Narrowing "Moderator" narrows every moderator.
- A role still held by members can't be deleted. Move them off it first — the message tells you how many people are on it.
- Already-granted roles keep working if a permission later becomes unavailable; nothing is revoked behind your back because a subscription lapsed.
- A role needs at least one permission and a name of 2–60 characters, unique in the community. "Owner" and "Member" are reserved. A built-in you deleted can be made again under the same name.
- When the owner gives someone the Admin or Moderator role, ESTAGE also invites them into the owner's video workspace, so they can upload into the community's video library.