User Creation

User accounts for both the Mobile App and Administration Website are handled using Meteor's Accounts system and password-based authentication. All existing users are collected in the users collection. There are two types of users: regular users (data field roles of collection users has a value user) and admin users (data field roles of collection users has a value ['user', 'admin']). Regular users can only access the Mobile App, whereas administrator users can access both the Mobile App and the Administration Website.

As we are using Meteor's default account and authentication system, there are currently two ways to create a new user. You can complete this task either through the Administration Website or the Mobile App. Regular users can be created through both the Administration Website and the Mobile App. The creation of user accounts through the Mobile App is currently disabled (commented out in the source code). This is to make sure that no third-parties external to experiments can get access to the app.

Creation of Regular Users

Regular users are typically created over the tool for User Creation, after a researcher has decided how many users will participate in the experiment.

Users can also create an account independently through the app. This feature, however, is currently disabled. When creating experiments with this option enabled, we recommend that researchers create a survey for the group default-experiment, where participants need to submit their email address. This then allows for access control over the app.

Creation of Administrator Users

Admin users are created manually by developers with access to the MongoDB. For this, a user account must be created through the Mobile App, and consequently, its data fields in the user collection must be manually updated. Specifically, the following fields have to be overwritten:

• roles: needs to be changed from ['user'] to ['user', 'admin']
• participatesIn: this is the experiment to which the Mobile App will be connected (if an admin user owns a couple of experiments, only one of them can be shown in the user's Mobile App). Currently, there is an 'admins-experiment', to which this field can be overwritten
• userGroup: you can assign any group name to the admin user, e.g., DE, if you want to separate researchers according to the country of their university
• experiments (optional): this field does not have to be overwritten. You can use it to control which experiments an admin user owns, i.e., can see and manipulate, over the Admin Website. An experiment can be owned by multiple admin users. Be careful when allowing research access to other experiments