Skald-Circle/docs/roles.md

The Roles page (admin)

Sidebar → Roles, admin only. A role is a bundle of settings that every member assigned to it picks up together: which security group their assistant runs under, which interface they see, which agent answers them, and whether new extensions reach them automatically. Picking a role for a person happens on users.md; what that role means is edited here.

The list ships with three roles (on the standard profile): Administrator, Member and Children. Roles are data, not built-in categories — "Children" is a preset row the admin can edit like any other, and a role for guests or staff is just a fourth row. Administrator is the one exception: it is built-in, locked, and neither editable nor deletable (admins hold every permission implicitly, so there is nothing meaningful to configure).

The role editor

Creating a role asks for an ID (a lowercase slug, permanent — it cannot be changed later) and a Label. Everything else is the same in create and edit:

• Default security group — the group the role's conversations run under when the member has not chosen otherwise. What a group permits is edited on the Security page, not here: security-groups.md.
• Additional security groups — extra groups the member may switch to in chat, via the shield pill. Leave it empty and there is no pill and nothing to choose: for most members one group is the whole point. The switch happens inside the conversation, and the server refuses any group the role does not list — whatever the interface shows.
• Interface — Full (all pages) or Simple (chat, inbox and projects only, with the assistant's internal reasoning hidden from the message list). Simple mode is a simpler menu, not a fence: every page remains protected server-side, and a simple-mode member can still own and share projects like anyone else.
• Default assistant — which chat agent the role's members talk to. Empty means the standard Assistant. The change lands on new conversations, picked up at the member's next login; an existing conversation keeps the agent it started with. (Project chats are unaffected: they always get the project's own coordinator.)
• New plugins and connectors — whether anything the admin installs reaches this role automatically. This is the one setting with a page of its own, because it interacts with per-person grants: see access.md. Existing access is never changed by this switch, in either direction.
• Attrs (JSON, optional) — the raw store the fields above read from and write to. Editing it by hand is for attributes the form does not surface yet; normally you never touch it.

Two things happen the moment a role is saved, worth knowing before an admin edits one mid-afternoon:

• Narrowing takes effect immediately, including on open sessions. Removing a group from a role's allowed list pushes members who are logged in and sitting on that group back to a group they may use — the wider permission cannot be outrun by staying logged in.
• Nothing is re-granted or re-taken. The auto-grant switch only decides what happens next time something is installed or someone is added; per-person grants stand exactly as they are.

Deleting a role is refused while anyone is still assigned to it — the admin moves those members to another role first, from each person's page. Creating a role is always safe: a brand-new role starts with the standard self-service connector permissions (registering remote MCP servers and activating vetted catalog scripts), and nothing else.

What this page is not

• Not the people. Assigning a role to a person, or changing it, is done from their page on users.md — and applies immediately, open sessions included.
• Not the security rules. What allow / require / deny means for a tool is edited per group on the Security page (security-groups.md); here a group is only picked from a list.
• Not a personality dial. The interface mode changes which pages a member sees, and the default assistant changes who answers — neither changes how the assistant behaves within a conversation. That is the agent's prompt (agents.md).

Common questions

• "Make the assistant simpler for my kid." — Two different asks, one page: a simple interface (fewer pages, no reasoning blocks) and a different default assistant (a gentler agent). The Children preset sets both; a custom agent can be added too, see agents.md.
• "Why can't I edit Administrator?" — it is built-in and locked. Admins hold everything implicitly; there is nothing to configure.
• "It won't let me delete the role." — someone is still on it. Move them to another role from their own page, then delete.
• "I moved my child to Member — why don't they have the plugins everyone else has?" — a role change never hands out or takes back what was already granted. The admin ticks the boxes once on that person's page: access.md.
• "Can I show just one extra page in simple mode?" — no; simple mode is chat, inbox and projects, as a set. Anything more is the full interface.
• "Does changing the role log them out?" — no. It applies to their open sessions immediately; nothing needs to restart.

Related

• users.md — assigning a role to a person, and everything else on their page
• security-groups.md — what a security group permits, and the shield in the chat
• access.md — the auto-grant switch in full: the open default, and why Children opts out
• agents.md — chat agents, custom agents, and how the default assistant is chosen