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3.2 Creating Users

The first task to perform in new WAassistant tracker is to create users. WAassistant tracker users are classified into several roles, each of which has its own view of the tracker and different access rights. The following user roles are defined in WAassistant:

Administrator
This is the power user who can perform any action in the tracker. Under normal circumstances, his role should start and end with creating and managing the users.
Anonymous users
The system is somewhat open to non-logged users. They can use some of its facilities like Report previews or Quick Testing. This mode of operation is primarily intended for the webmasters of the tested pages. If you need to restrict world-wide access to the tracker, use common Web access restriction tools for the purpose.
Supervisors
Supervisors are managers of the project who can do anything in the system except for creating and editing other users and making actions forbidden by the WAassistant rules (like closing a checkpoint dependent on a not-yet-closed checkpoint).
Testers
Testers are users with special roles in the testing process. Typically they test particular accessibility features like testing pages in particular browsers, checking speech output produced by assistive technologies or checking properties of images. They have view access to most parts of the system but only limited editing rights.

The roles are overlapping in WAassistant. For instance, Supervisors have also all the permissions of Testers and Anonymous users.

During WAassistant tracker setup in Roundup two users are automatically created: admin (with the password given during the setup process) which is the system administrator power user, and anonymous which represents a user who is not logged in. Note you can't log in as anonymous explicitly, you become anonymous automatically each time you log out or before you log in.

So the first step which should be done in new WAassistant tracker is to log in as admin and create new users. At least one Supervisor user must be created before Create Users checkpoint can be set to done.

The security mechanism used in WAassistant is the standard Roundup one. If you care about security of your data, you may want to use standard Web server security means to protect and regulate access to the tracker.