User roles

Snikket allows you to select a role for users, each role granting different permissions.

Each user may have one of three roles:

Administrator

This is the default role of the first user (if you’re reading this, that’s probably you!).

Administrators have full control over the server, settings, users and circles. These features can be accessed primarily through the admin panel in the Snikket web interface.

Normal

This is the default role for most users. It gives access to all non-administrative server functionality.

Limited

Limited users have various restrictions. The purpose of this role is to allow granting someone an account on the server, only for the purposes of communicating with other people on that server. This can be useful to provide a guest or child account, for example.

In particular, limited users are not allowed to:

Communicate with users on other servers
Join group chats on other servers
Create public channels (including on the current server)
Invite new users to the server (regardless of whether this is enabled for normal users).

Caveats

The current support for limited users has some known issues. It is designed to prevent casual misuse of the server, but it is not intended to be a foolproof security measure. For example, limited users are still able to receive messages and contact requests from other servers, even though they cannot send them to other servers. It is expected that we will restrict incoming traffic for limited users in a future release, after further testing.

Also note that limited accounts may have issues using non-Snikket mobile apps that use push notifications, depending on the design of the app. This is because the restrictions may prevent the app communicating with its' developer’s push notification services over XMPP.