Documentation

Special Permission FREEJOIN

Andromeda's security overall provides many safeguards against unauthorized access. However, sometimes you have a public website and you want members of the public to be able to come and join without admin intervention to go set them up and put them in their groups.

The "freejoin" group flag can be used to specify that anybody can automatically put themselves into a particular group. This flag is, in our experience so far, used exclusively for public groups like "customers".

The syntax is simple, you put one flag on a group:

group customers:
    description: Customers
    freejoin: Y

FREEJOIN and SOLO

In most cases, a FREEJOIN group is also a SOLO group, meaning that members of that group cannot be put into any other group. This is the basic configuration for public ecommerce sites.

The reverse is not true, SOLO groups are not always FREEJOIN groups. For instance, a business may hold sensitive information for its customers that it makes available on the web. The users will be in a SOLO group, but the business does not just let anybody come along and sign up on their site -- it is only for their established customers. Therefore they will have a SOLO group for their customers but there will be no public sign-on process and that group will not be a FREEJOIN group.