Site Admin's Guide

What are Monorail site administrator accounts and what are they used for?

Site administrators are like super-users in Monorail. A site admin account can perform any action that any other account can perform, and some that are only available for site administrators. While most permissions can be granted to project members by project owners, some of the administrative permissions are reserved for site admins only.

Site admins have the ability to create projects and user groups. They can also make changes to existing projects, user groups, users, or issues on behalf of project owners that are having trouble making the desired changes for some reason. For example, a site admin might help a project owner by setting up an initial project configuration. Both project owners and site admins can ban users from the site to help fight spam and abuse.

How to create a project

1. Sign into your site admin account.

2. Visit the site home page.

3. Click the Create a new project link.

4. Fill in the project name, summary, and description.

5. Submit the form.

6. In the new project, visit the People page to grant a role to a project owner and remove yourself.

How to delete a project

1. Sign into your site admin account.
2. Open the gear menu and select Administer.
3. Click the Advanced tab at the top of the page.
4. Click a button to Archive the project.

Site admins also have a Doom option that schedules the project for deletion in 90 days. The Archive options will be a better choice for most projects because storage space is typically not a problem for our site.

How to increase the project storage quota

1. Sign into your site admin account and visit any page in the project.
2. Open the gear menu and select Administer.
3. Click the Advanced tab at the top of the page.
4. Type in a new storage limit. The limit is measured in megabytes.
5. Click Update Quota.

How to view the list of user groups

1. Sign into your site admin account.
2. Visit the /g URL to see the list of user groups.

There is currently no link to navigate to that page. It is only accessible to site admins.

How to create a new user group

1. Sign into your site admin account.
2. Visit the /g URL to see the list of user groups
3. Click Create Group.
4. Fill in the form and submit it.

Monorail has three types of user groups: native groups that are managed entirely within Monorail, synchronized user groups that are periodically copied from Google Groups or other sources, and computed user groups that are based entirely on email address domain name. To set up a synchronized user group, see the Monorail playbook.

How to ban a user account

1. Sign into your site admin account.
2. Visit the user’s profile page.
3. Fill in a reason to ban the user. Or, click Ban this user as a spammer.

The reason field serves as a note to other site admins, it is not shown to the user or other users.

If you use the Ban this user as a spammer button, all of the issues and comments posted by that user will be marked as spam.

How to completely delete a user account

1. Sign into your site admin account.
2. Visit the user's profile page.
3. Click Delete user account.

The user record will be deleted from our database. Any references to that user in issue fields or comment author lines will be removed or changed to a deleted user, but the content itself will be retained as part of the project that it was contributed to.