Overview

Before we get started with using federations, it's important that we understand just what exactly a federation is, and what the benefits are to using one. AFter that we'll be able to start looking at how we can set one up.

What Is A Federation?

A federation is a essentially a type of database, which holds a collection of banned users and the reason for their ban. It has its own set of administrators and an owner, who manage the list of bans and other information about the federation.

Why Use Federations?

The great part about federations is that they provide you with a way to manage or synchronize your bans across multiple groups. When your chat is linked to a federation, any bans in that federation also become applied to your group. What this means is that if you run multiple chats, you can link them all to your federation. Then, once somebody is banned from the federation, every chat linked to it will also apply those bans as well. It is a very handy tool if your community has several different chats

What About Global Bans?

Global bans are not available on Rose. This is actually a good thing, because it provides the owners and admins of chats to determine for themselves if they want to participate. What is meant by this is that with a global ban (like what was on Marie), while you could choose not to enforce them, there was no control over what types of users were banned. If somebody was globally banned for any reason, then they can't join any chats enforcing the global ban. With federations, you have some fine grained control as there are some great people in the community who maintain federations for specific purposes.

Will I Lose The Protection I Had From Global Bans In Marie?

While you can no longer use global bans, there are ways to get protection back which will work similarly to global bans. We will explore this later in the section.