4.0 - Logging in as Members

Day to day administration of your site and particularly managing member permissions has been greatly improved in IPS Community Suite 4.0. It is now easier than ever to see who has access to what but there are still times when being able to see exactly what a member sees can be useful. Perhaps a member is reporting that they can't view a section of the site or they need assistance altering settings on their account? For this reason administrators can log in to other users accounts automatically via the admin control panel where allowed.

Security

When dealing with access to other people's accounts security is of critical importance and we take this very seriously. Permissions for this are of course controlled by the ACP restrictions system so the ability can be toggled easily on a per user or group basis only to trusted administrators. The member also does not need to reveal their password to the administrator and all login actions are recorded in the logs so security and an audit trail is maintained.

Logging In

The process of logging in as a user starts in much the same way as in previous versions of the suite. When viewing a member in the ACP you simply click sign in and a new window with your user session is created.

For IPS Community Suite 4.0 we have improved several areas of this implementation. Firstly, when logging in as a user you do not lose your existing admin session. You still show logged in as yourself but acting on behalf of somebody else. The user menu updates to show this and serve as a reminder so you do not forget to log out and continue posting using another account. All actions you now perform are as if you were logged in as the user themselves. Viewing and posting permissions reflect the user you are logged in as and any content created will show as if posted by that user.

In previous versions not having this workflow was frustrating as you would log in as another user and then when you were finished need to log back out and then log back in with your administrator account. We have now made this seamless. When logging out from another user account in IPS Community Suite 4.0 you are simply returned back to your original admin session with no need to log back in.

Summary

We hope that these small but powerful changes make for a much more productive workflow. Helping members with access issues and making sure your user permissions are set up correctly should now be much more practical and intuitive.

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