"Read Only" LiveWhale accounts

Feature Requests
1

This may be more of a feature request than a discussion, but I am curious if others have had this need and if so, how they have handled it.

We often have instances where it would be nice if someone could have a LiveWhale account but not be able to edit anything with it - “read-only” if you will. This includes situations like:

  • Someone receives form submission emails that contain attachments. They have to be logged in to LiveWhale to view the attachments, but often form recipients are not LiveWhale editors.
  • Someone receives form submissions and would like to log in to get the CSV, but they do not need to be able to edit Forms.
  • Same as above but with Event RSVPs.
  • Some people need to be able to review hidden content before it goes live, but they have to be logged in to LiveWhale to do that.

From my testing, I cannot even create a LiveWhale user without granting them at least one permission.

I have worked around some things by combining custom fields on the user editor with some backend CSS/JS. Curious if others have similar needs and/or solutions.

2

While I like the idea proposed, I wonder if in practice that giving these people one of the following would be sufficient?

  1. Newbie - Make edits to public webpages (without “make live”)
  2. Editor - Edit dynamic content (limited to relevant type(s), without “publish”)

I believe I tested these once for student editors with high supervision. #1 can make page drafts, but can’t publish them. #2 can make new content, but cannot publish them nor (I think) edit already published content.

If it works as I remember, anyone misusing these limited permissions (drafting content) would be a nuisance at best. In practice, assuming these are employees, I doubt many if anyone would do more than the few tasks outlined in your list if that’s all they needed.

3

I don’t need people poking around things they have no business poking around in. :wink:

But that’s essentially what I’ve done. For example, I can give someone non-publish access to forms, but then using a custom field on the user editor assign them as a “reviewer”. Then I use that custom field along with CSS/JS to remove any links/buttons that allow them to edit anything. They can really only get to the form submissions at that point.

1 Like