frequently asked questions

The Groups section is a powerful tool to allow you to manage the capabilities defined for your site users. You can create an unlimited number of overlapping groups to allow for various ways of defining what your users are permitted to do. For example, you may want to define a power users group that grants extra capabilities and incentives to your most active site users.

Groups can be set up on the XUD Administrator's page by selecting "Groups" from the "Maintain" menu. The first screen on the group administration page lists the groups that you have defined. Groups are listed in ascending order of priority. This means the lowest priority is at the top of the group list, and the highest priority is at the bottom of the group list. When the application is trying to decide if a user has a certain capability and that user belongs to multiple groups, the application will look for the capability that is defined in the group with the highest priority. Therefore, it is very important that you pay attention to the order in which your groups are displayed on this page.

The first group listed is the Everyone group. This is the group to which all users are assigned by default at the time of registration. Because this is the group that is used to define default user capabilities, you cannot disable or delete this group. You do not normally want to move this group from the top row (lowest priority).

Clicking the Caps button at the end of the row will bring you to the page where you can define the capabilities for the user group. On the page displayed, the first two columns are where you set the Capability and the Value for that capability. These capabilities allow you to define permissions including whether or not users can access certain features of other XCENT web server applications or whether or not they can post items within the other applications. There are also capabilities that will allow you to define groups whose members are not charged site fees or whose members are charged reduced fees. Some of the user capabilities are application specific and they will not apply unless you have also installed the corresponding application.

Here is an example: Suppose you wanted 3 groups of users within xcAuction: users who can bid on postings but not post their own listings, users who can post listings but not bid, and users who can do both. By default, users will be able to only bid.

First, you would create two groups in addition to the Everyone group. We'll call them Sellers and PowerUsers. For the Everyone group, the capability of AUCBID needs to be set to Y, and AUCPOST is set to N. Users who then register on your site will be able to bid but not post.

The Seller group would be set up in reverse: AUCBID is set to N, and AUCPOST is set to Y. These users can then only post auctions and cannot bid.

The PowerUsers group would then need to have AUCBID set to Y. This group, which needs to be listed below Sellers, would inherit the AUCPOST setting of Y from the Sellers group, and would not need to be set explicitly.

A user who wishes to sell an item would then need to contact you and request the ability to post auctions. You would then add them to either of the other groups, depending on whether or not you wanted them to still be able to bid.

You could also add other capabilities to the groups. For instance, if you wanted to charge users of the Seller group fees for posting, you would make sure that NOFEE, NOAUCBASEFEE, and NOAUCLISTFEE were all set to N. The PowerUsers group could then have any of these capabilities set to Y, and users in that group would either be charged no fees at all, no base fee but fees for extras such as image uploads or special placement and any closing fees, or no fees to place an auction but would still be assessed any closing fees, respectively.

Other options are also possible. By setting MAXAUCITEMS on either group that can post, you can limit how many active auctions a user can have at once. You might set this to 50 for the Sellers group, but override that setting to 1000 for the PowerUsers group, allowing those users to have more listings. You could also want to give users a 50% discount on all fees by setting DISCFEE to 50.

Groups become more powerful when used with Subscriptions. By using Subscriptions, users can select a plan that effectively places them in one of your Groups for a fee. You could set up your site so users can select a free subscription that will only allow them to bid by linking it to the Everyone group, be charged $10 a month to be able to place up to 50 listings a month and be charged all applicable fees, or be charged $50 a month and able to bid, post up to 1000 auctions, and not pay any additional fees, or any other combination of features for any price and for any length of time. The possibilities are nearly endless as to how you can configure your site.

Here is a list of currently supported capabilities and what they control: