I've been working on the code behind the site for the past few days, to bring into play a sane permissions system.

Right now there are three classes of user upon the site:

Anonymous Users

These are people who haven't created an account, or who have an account but aren't currently logged in.

Registered Users

These are users who have accounts, and are currently logged in.

These users may create bookmarks, tags, create weblog entries, disable the presentation of adverts, etc.

As of today we have about 5700 of you.

Site Admins

These people are able to do almost everything on the site:

• Edit/Deleted/Suspend users.
• Approve/Reject/Edit pending polls, articles, and adverts.
• Report comments instantly, without waiting for other users to agree.
• Etc. etc.

One or two operations require flushing the memory cache, or poking the database, but generally these are one-off events.

So why the change? Well when I'm busy some things just don't happen. New articles aren't editted (butchered?) or approved. New site messages aren't read, and e-mail is neglected. Generally if I'm not awake/alive/around things suffer.

So I've made a list of people who have consistently given good advice and contributed interesting articles/comments/weblog entries and I've started mailing them to see if they'd like to be "promoted".

Many of the site-admin powers are easily abused (e.g. I can view users email addresses: I trust myself not to stalk/spam so I've never regarded that as a problme). Whilst I'm not going to ask people I don't trust I don't want to tempt them, or risk fate, by allowing more access than required: Hence a new permissions system.

The code is still being wired up, but it is 95% complete and ready for prime time. Its been an interesting time experimenting with different options for control, and coming up with a reasonably simple and extensible framework for applying ACLs to different operations.

If there are other people using the code comments are welcome, I should probably update the site documentation, but I mostly release the code to keep myself honest - not because I'm aware of people using it ..