Accessing Permissions

Permissions are accessed by going to the collection page and clicking on edit and then clicking on the button for permissions (the eye with a line through it). Only collection creators and those with owner permissions can change permissions on a collection.

Kinds of Permissions

There are 4 kinds of permissions in TM.

• owners
• place writers (placers for short)
• post writers (posters for short)
• readers

Owners can edit collection attributes and set permissions, place writers can add places to a collection, post writers cannot add places but can make comments and vote, and readers can only browse a collection but cannot add or edit any content.

Note that these permissions are hierarchical, i.e. all place writers are post writers and all post writers are readers and all owners have all available permissions.

Making a Collection Private

After clicking the permissions button, you will see 4 buttons for each of the 4 kinds of permissions. Click each button to see the current permission settings for that type of permission.

By default, when created all collections are "anyone with a link can view," but you must add users explicitly in order to allow posting and place making.

Private collections are hierarchical in the opposite order, i.e. post private collections are all place private and read private collections are all post private. So if you wanted to allow public contribution of places, click "public" on the posting and placing tabs.

Configuring a Private Collection

If a collection is private for a given permission type you will see widgets to configure permissions.

At the top you will see a list of users that have that permission, each with a remove button which would revoke that permission.

Giving permissions roughly works the same as Google Docs - i.e. send links to people to whom you want to give the permission. To get the link that bestows a given kind of permission, just click the "link" button and the link will be copied to the clipboard for you to, most likely, paste into an email to send to a collaborator.

Additionally you can click the "generate" button to generate a new link if you think someone has access to the link that should not have access, which will invalidate all previous links for this permission (it does not invalidate users who have already accepted the permission; it just invalidates the link).

Finally, at the bottom will be a button to make the collection "public" again.

Note: public owner collections do not exist - you must give ownership explicitely.

Accepting Permissions

When a user clicks on the link that is copied above (to provide a given permission), they will be taken to a page in TM which provides the description of the collection, allows the user to login, at which point they can click on an "accept" button which bestows the permission. When a permission is accepted the collection is automatically followed for that user.

Login Not Required for Read Access

As a small caveat, read access by default does not require the user to login and "accept" permissions. This is similar to Google Docs, where anyone with a link can view.

In TM though, for a person to edit a place or make a post to a private collection, they must be logged in and "accept" the permissions.

An additional button is provided for read permissions to change the default to require that a user be logged in and accept read permission (in this way the user can be tracked and the permission revoked, although this is not common).