User policies

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Roles and permissions


User policies

The following settings may be changed by an administrator in User policies in the Site administration.

Role for visitors

Users who are not logged in to the site will be treated as if they have the role specified here, granted to them at the site context. The role of Guest is the default and the recommended setting for standard Moodle sites. The user will still be required to login to participate in an activity.

Role for guest

This option specifies the role that will automatically be assigned to the guest user. This role is also temporarily assigned to non enrolled users when they enter a course that allows guests without password.

(If you wish to deny guest access to a site altogether, the guest login button should be set to hide in Manage authentication in the Site administration.)

Default role for all users

It is recommended that the default role for all users is set to Authenticated user. To set it to a custom role, the custom role must be assignable in the system context and have role archetype set to none.

Note: It is not recommended that the default role for all users is set to student.

Creators' role in new courses

Moodle will automatically enroll the user creating a new course in the course with the role specified in this setting. Moodle checks that the role used for creating the course e.g. "Course creator" has the right to assign the specified role in the new course. This means that the following capabilities needs to be set on the course creator role before the user is enrolled automatically :

  • moodle/course:create | Allow
  • moodle/course:manageactivities | Allow
  • moodle/course:viewparticipants | Allow
  • moodle/role:assign | Allow

If the course creator role is not setup correctly the user will be enrolled in the course without any roles.

Auto-login guest

If not set, then visitors must click the "Login as a guest" button before entering a course which allows guest access.

Note: If auto-login guest is set, the guest login button also needs to be set to show in Manage authentication in the Site administration, even though visitors won't necessarily use it.

Hide user fields

The following user fields appear on users' profile pages. Certain user fields are also listed on the course participants page. You can increase student privacy by hiding selected user fields. You can hide the following fields:

Description, Email address, City/town, Country, MoodleNet profile ID, Timezone, First access, Last access, Last IP address, My courses, Groups, Suspended account.

  • User fields on users' profile pages are hidden from all users with the capability moodle/user:viewhiddendetails 'Not set'. By default the roles Manage, Editing teacher and Non-editing teacher have this set to Allow. Other roles have this set to 'Not set'.
  • User fields on the course participants page are hidden from all users with the capability moodle/course:viewhiddenuserfields 'Not set'. By default the roles Manage, Editing teacher and Non-editing teacher have this set to Allow. Other roles have this set to 'Not set'.

Note: in previous versions of Moodle the optional "social" user fields were also on this list. However, those were changed to become custom user profile fields in Moodle 3.11. If you are still using them, you can control their visibility in the their individual field settings.

Show user identity

Any of the following fields may be shown to users with the capability moodle/site:viewuseridentity when searching for users and displaying lists of users; ; by default, teachers and managers.

This setting is useful for sites with large number of users, where the likelihood of users with the same name is high.

  • Username
  • ID number
  • Email address
  • Phone number
  • Mobile phone
  • Department
  • Institution
  • City/town
  • Country


Custom profile fields (shown with an asterisk against their name) may be selected to appear in certain locations.

Locations where user identity fields are shown are as follows:

Tip: Select only one or two fields that are mandatory at your institution. Do not select more than two fields otherwise tables become very wide.

Full name format

See Additional name fields for details, also about the alternative full name format.

Maximum users per page

You can choose here the maximum number of users to be displayed when searching in courses, groups, cohorts etc. The default is 100 but if your Moodle site is very large you can increase the number here.

Enable Gravatar

Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a third party service for providing globally personal avatars.

If Gravatar service is enabled by the administrator and a user has not uploaded any user picture, Moodle will check whether the user's email address has an associated gravatar account and if so, will use the gravatar as the user's picture.

Gravatar default image URL

In Moodle 2.3.3 onwards, if gravatars are enabled, an alternative default user picture may be specified. The options are:

If the field is left empty then the theme's default user picture is used.

Unsupported role assignments

Unsupported role assignments are role assignments in contexts that make no sense for that role, such as the course creator role in the course or activity context, or the teacher role in the user context.

Prior to Moodle 2.0, there was no 'Context types where this role may be assigned' setting in the edit role form, and so any role could be assigned in any context. Upon upgrading a site from 1.9, any role assignments in contexts that make no sense for that role are listed as unsupported role assignments.

In general, it is safe to delete all unsupported role assignments. In doing so, the worst that can happen is for a user to be unassigned a custom role; no other data loss will occur.

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