Users, registration & roles
Member accounts, registration, roles and the favourites and watch-history features.
Every visitor to your site is either an anonymous guest or a registered member, and a small number of trusted accounts are staff who can reach the admin panel. TubePress ships a complete account system with three roles, self-service registration, and member features like favourites and watch history.
This page explains the account types, how registration works, what each role is allowed to do, how to manage accounts from the admin, and the profile features your members get.
User accounts
There are two broad kinds of account, separated by whether they can reach the admin:
user). They can comment, like and favourite videos, build a watch history and edit their own profile — but never see the admin panel./admin and manage the site.@imported.local email) so videos can be grouped by uploader. See Taxonomy for how channels-as-users work.Registration
Visitors sign up from the front-end login dialog. A single Registration toggle in your Settings controls whether the public sign-up form is accepted at all — turn it off to run an invite-only or staff-only site, and the register endpoint refuses new accounts.
When registration is open, every sign-up is validated:
- Username — 3 to 50 characters, letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores only, and must be unique.
- Email — a valid, unique address.
- Password — at least 8 characters, confirmed twice.
Sign-ups are rate-limited and can be protected with a CAPTCHA so bots cannot mass-register. New registrations can also ping you over Telegram. Passwords are stored with Argon2id where the host supports it, falling back to bcrypt, and are transparently re-hashed on the next login if the algorithm changes.
Roles & permissions
Authorisation is handled by a default-deny Gate: an account can only do what its role explicitly allows. There are three roles.
| Role | What it can do | Admin panel |
|---|---|---|
| Member | Act on its own content only — edit or delete its own comments and edit its own profile. | No |
| Moderator | Everything a member can, plus day-to-day moderation: manage videos, comments and tags. | Yes (limited) |
| Administrator | Full control of the whole site, including users, settings, pages, themes and plugins. | Yes (full) |
Sensitive, admin-only areas — global settings, users, themes and plugins — are reserved for full administrators; a moderator who reaches the panel is refused those screens. If two-factor authentication is enrolled on a staff account, the panel demands the code before letting it in, even if the person signed in through the public login form.
Managing users
All accounts are listed under /admin/users, where you can search by username or email and page through the directory. From here you can:
- Create a new account and set its role.
- Edit the username, email and bio — the edit screen also surfaces that user's favourites, likes, comments and history counts plus their recent activity.
- Activate or deactivate an account. Deactivating is your ban switch: the user keeps their data but can no longer log in.
- Delete a single account, or select several and bulk-delete.
Member features
An account unlocks the personal features that keep viewers coming back. Each requires the visitor to be logged in:
/favorites./history, which the member can clear at any time.These signals also feed the ranking and recommendation systems — see Taxonomy for how uploaders (channels) are modelled as accounts.
Profiles
Members manage everything from /profile, a tabbed screen covering their account details, favourites, history and liked videos. On the account tab they can change their username, email and password. Changing the password requires re-entering the current one, so a hijacked open session cannot silently lock the owner out.
Forgotten passwords are handled by a self-service flow: the member requests a reset, receives a one-time link by email that expires after an hour, and sets a new password. To prevent account enumeration, the site always reports success whether or not the address exists. Make sure email delivery is configured — see Notifications.
Next steps
Still stuck?
Open a ticket from your dashboard and our team will help you out.