Members and Roles
Access to the online services - the web app and the StoryletEngine Server - is organised around organisations, members, and roles. This page explains what the roles mean and, if you're an administrator, how to manage the people in an organisation.
The idea
- An organisation owns all the content and runtime data.
- A member is a person who belongs to an organisation.
- A role is a bundle of capabilities, granted per organisation. The same person can hold different roles in different organisations.
- Belonging to an organisation at all gives you read access. Roles add powers on top.
Roles come in two families - one for the authoring tool, one for the server - plus the cross-cutting administrator role. They're additive: a member can hold several, and a higher role covers everything the lower ones can do.
Authoring roles (the web app)
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Viewer | Read everything in every view; post and resolve comments. No editing, no publishing. |
| Editor | Everything a Viewer can do, plus create and edit story content - storylets, decks, state, and the story on the table and Plot views - run Simulate and Coverage Testing, and import / export. |
| Designer | Everything an Editor can do, plus edit the StoryMap Design page: placing and laying out zones and sites, and their backgrounds. |
| Publisher | Everything an Editor can do, plus build a runtime bundle and stage it on the server. |
| Manager | Everything above, plus create and manage storyworlds and their settings, and invite people to the organisation with an invite link. |
Designer and Publisher are independent additions on top of Editor - a person can have either, both, or neither. Editing zone and site properties is an Editor capability (done on the Plot page); only laying out the map itself needs the Designer role.
Server roles (the StoryletEngine Server)
These apply only if your organisation has access to the StoryletEngine Server. Not every organisation does: server access is a per-organisation setting controlled by the platform operator (see below). An organisation can use the web authoring app while being blocked from the server entirely - in which case its members can't sign in to the server even with the roles below, and these roles never come into play.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Producer | Run and monitor live sessions: start, pause, and end sessions; watch live state; apply overrides; restore checkpoints; advance the turn. The show-runner role. |
| Manager | Everything a Producer can do, plus create and configure applications, promote a staged bundle to live (and roll back), and issue or revoke access keys for external devices. |
Staging a bundle (an authoring Publisher) and promoting it live (a server Manager) are deliberately separate steps. On a larger team the person who prepares a release isn't necessarily the one who makes it live; on a small team one person holds both roles and does both.
Inviting people
You bring someone into an organisation with an invite link. It grants a role set you choose, and it works whether the person signs in with Google or with an email and password.
Creating an invite link (Managers and Administrators)
Anyone who can invite - a Manager, an Administrator, or the platform operator - sees an Invite link button (on the storyworlds screen, and in the Members panel). Choose the roles to grant and an expiry (1, 7, or 30 days) and you get a single-use link to send however you like (email, chat, and so on).
Whoever opens the link signs in and lands straight in the organisation with those roles - you don't need to know their email address in advance. Each link works once and then expires.
You can add an optional note ("who's this for?") when you create a link. That note, with the expiry, is what the pending list shows, so you can tell links apart. For security the link itself can't be shown again after you create it, so copy it there and then. If a link is lost, revoke it in the Members panel and make a new one.
One limit: a Manager can invite people but can't issue a link that grants the Administrator role. Only an Administrator (or the platform operator) can do that.
The Members panel (Administrators)
Full member management lives in the Members panel, which only Administrators can see. It lets you:
- List members with their roles and status.
- Create an invite link (the same generator as the button on the storyworlds screen).
- Change a member's roles.
- Suspend, reactivate, or remove a member.
- See and revoke pending invite links.
To revoke someone's access entirely, suspend or remove their membership rather than just clearing their roles. Membership itself is what grants read access, so a member with no explicit role is still a Viewer.
Platform operator
A single platform operator (superadmin) can reach every organisation. From the Superadmin console they can:
- Create, rename, and delete organisations.
- Manage any organisation's members (the same controls an Administrator has, for any org).
- Turn each organisation's server access on or off - this is what decides whether an organisation's members may use the StoryletEngine Server at all.
This is an operations role held by whoever runs the service, not something assigned within a normal organisation, and it's intentionally rare.