Consider:

• "Developers.JoeHacker"
• "Users.JoeAverage"
• "Sysadmins.JoeCamel"
• "Authors.JoePress"
• "Students.JoePassfail"
• "Managers.JoePointyhair"

(Apologies to everyone named Joe)

Webs can act as a grouping mechanism to bring similar users together.

-- PaulReiber - 15 Jun 2001

It's not clear what the benefit of doing this would be - are you looking to apply authentication based on groups (which is already supported)? I don't think that splitting users into different webs is very useful given that we already have user groups. I'd rather see them in a User sub-web of the Main web (or a separate hidden Users web), so they could be referenced as User.JoeSchmoe rather than Main.JoeSchmoe.

-- RichardDonkin - 16 Jun 2001

Agree with Richard, having all users in the same web is easier for maintenance and also easier to link to from other webs. If users are scattered over many webs you always need to find out in what web is JoeSchmoein order to link him.

At work we have many webs for the different business units. Each BU has the org chart defined in the webs, i.e.

• Group ABC:
  • Main.JoeAverage - Lead
  • Main.JoeCamel - Dev engr
  • Main.JoePress - Tech writer
  • Main.JoePassfail - QA
  • Main.JoePointyhair - Paper clip bender

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Jun 2001

• The primary benefits are to the users, not to the administrators.

• user-contributed pages would tend to be about the topic of the web they're in. Right now, users have to be EXPERTS to realize that editing their own page to add TopicOne TopicTwo etc. is the wrong way to do things, that they should find the correct WEB for the Topics then add them in there.

• Better collaboration, sense of ownership, etc. - all QA people grouped together (a scary thought for some) will tend to share more QA related resources in their web.

• it's not about authentication at all - the Groups mechanism we have is only for authentication, not oriented around the people in the group or helping them collaborate.

• It is about getting user references to read better - in my mind, Managers.PaulReiber is preferable to Users.PaulReiber is preferable to Main.PaulReiber

I don't know what the issues are w.r.t. maintenance that make it easier to have all users in one web, so I can't comment. As for finding the users so as to be able to link to them, this is one place where new syntax might help (would help with existing situation too) - maybe /PaulReiber/ becomes a reference to my page, no matter where it is?

-- PaulReiber - 19 Jun 2001

This is related to what I was alluding to in (where was is, dammit, need a PopupPageIndexForEditing ....) ImportingContexts (and, oh, again in TopicNotFoundInThisWeb), but rather for any topic rather than for just users. My thoughts continue in ImportingContexts....

-- MartinCleaver - 19 Jun 2001

I have just created a patch which allows one to put all user related info on a seperate web. Although it doesn't do exactly what you want it is at least a start. Go to UserWeb.

-- KevinAtkinson - 25 Jan 2002