Library permissions: create/drop only

We're working with group libraries that have many member. I've previously posted abou5 stopping selected group members from deleting, but thats hard to do.

Would it be possible to have a permission that allowed creation of items (from scratch or by dragging)? I.e., people can view and create, but cannot amend, merge, delete, move between folders?
  • I see the general idea of this, and I think many instructors using Zotero would find this useful in principle, but wouldn't the fact that you can't, e.g., fix item metadata after import -- as you will often want to do -- be really inconvenient and frustrating?

    I say this while fully in agreement with the larger goal that you're pointing to, i.e. having settings that make working in large groups that aren't read-only more viable.
  • Any solution would have to preserve the ability to edit and delete items you yourself created. Otherwise, in addition to not being able to correct metadata, you wouldn't be able to delete something that you saved to the library from the connector before choosing another library, which would be a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
  • Yeah, I think a group setting where you can add new items and edit & delete your own items but not others' would solve a lot of use cases.
  • Yeah - agreed.

    I guess this is hard to do via plugin? What would be needed to implement that?
  • Given that this requires sever-side permissions, I think this is just not doable in a reasonably robust way with a plugin (e.g., a plugin definitely wouldn't be able to prevent online deletions or deletions on a Zotero client without the plugin installed, and those are just the obvious issues)
  • OK, yeah - that makes sense!
  • @adamsmith and @dstillman, is there any chance of getting more fine-grained permissions server-side? I imagine it's out of the question?

    This would be good: "A group setting where you can add new items and edit & delete your own items but not others' [items]"

    We'd also want something like: "A group setting where you can add new items and edit your items. Either you cannot delete, or you have a grace period of one hour after creation, during which you can delete your own items in case of mistakes." (For us it's really important that the zotero item keys don't go away once they have been created.)


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