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Membership visibility

The details of the security model isn't properly documented. Much information can be extracted from various parts of the protocol specification, but there is no complete overview. In time, this chapter may become such an overview. For now, it only defines when a membership is visible.

The various requests that return information about a membership can be grouped into three categories:

• Category 1: given a conference, list (some of) the members.
  • get-members
  • get-members-old

  These requests fail if the conference is secret and you don't have access to it, even if a membership should be visible to you according to the rules below.

• Category 2: given a person, list (some of) the conferences that the person is a member of.
  • get-membership
  • get-membership-old
  • get-unread-confs

  These requests fail if the person is secret and you don't have access to it, even if a membership should be visible to you according to the rules below.

• Category 3: given a person and a conference, return the membership.
  • query-read-texts
  • query-read-texts-old

  These requests follows the rules below exactly.

The rules for membership visibility are given below. In the explanation, the variables C, P and V are used like this:

• a conference C
• a person P who is a member of the conference C
• a viewer V who wants to find out about P:s membership in C.

The following flags also influences how much V can see:

• the unread-is-secret flag of P
• the secret flag of P:s membership in C

The following rules determines if a memberhip is visible to V. The first rule that matches is used.

• If V is supervisor of P, then the membership is visible. Both the unread-is-secret and secret flags are ignored.
• If V is supervisor of C, then the membership is visible. The secret flag is ignored. The unread-is-secret flag is honored.
• If V is allowed to see both P and C, and if secret is unset, then the membership is visible. The unread-is-secret flag is honored.
• Otherwise, V is not allowed to se the membership.