Ask Rusty access tiers

Every question resolves the member to a single tier, and that tier decides which content is assembled, which tools are offered, and what each tool is allowed to return.

The ladder

public < flyer < coach < instructor < trainer < examiner < manager < admin

Tiers are cumulative. An instructor sees instructor, coach, flyer and public material. A trainer sees all of that plus trainer material. This is a change from the old assistant, where each role mapped to exactly one document set and an instructor could not see flyer-level material.

Roles map on as follows:

Three of those need explaining.

Examiner is its own tier, directly above trainer, rather than being folded into it. It lapses on trainer currency, because there is no separate examiner currency to check.

Site Administrator and Members fail closed to public. Both are legacy groups; Super Admin is the only real administrative role. This deliberately removes assistant access from a small number of existing Site Administrator accounts rather than granting a legacy group broad reach by default.

Coach is not a role. The Coach role has no members — coach is a rating held by a flyer, and is handled by elevation rather than by role mapping.

Currency lapse

A member whose currency has lapsed drops to flyer, for content and tools alike. An instructor who has not completed their recurrent training is treated as a flyer until they are current again.

This is why access is resolved live rather than read from the JWT: role_id does not change when currency lapses, so a token issued while current would keep asserting instructor long after the member stopped being one.

Which currency is checked depends on the assigned tier — instructor currency for instructors, trainer currency for trainers and examiners.

Coach elevation

Coach is applied after the lapse check, because it is earned separately and an instructor lapse should not strip it. A member who has been confirmed as a coach is raised to coach tier even when their instructor rating has lapsed.

The practical effect: a lapsed instructor who holds a coach rating sees coach and flyer material, not instructor material.

Open decision. The test for “is an active coach” currently differs between the assistant and the site’s own Member Directory gate — the assistant checks payment status, the site checks flyer currency. Roughly 178 members are treated as a coach by one and not the other. Recorded as TUN-788 T091; settle it before relying on either.

Denied accounts

Banned and Deleted accounts receive no answer. The model is never called, so the refusal costs nothing, and the attempt is still logged.

This matters more than it looks. The old assistant had no case for either role, so both fell through to the same default as an unrecognised role and were served the public document set. Forbidden and unknown were indistinguishable; they no longer are.

Capabilities

Separately from the tier, the resolver answers a small set of yes/no questions about what a member may do — currently whether they can use the Member Directory. Capabilities gate tools, where tiers gate content.

Directory access mirrors the site’s own rule: Skyventure tunnel managers, current instructors, and active coaches.

What a tier does not do

A tier never causes the assistant to pretend a page does not exist. Pages are always described, with who they are for and whether this member can open one. Only documents are omitted entirely when out of scope.