---
label: 'Managing user accounts and site visitors'
top_level: true
---
<h2>{% trans %}What is a user?{% endtrans %}</h2>
<p>{% trans %}A user is anyone accessing or viewing your site. <em>Anonymous</em> users are users who are not logged in, and <em>Authenticated</em> users are users who are logged in.{% endtrans %}</p>
<h2>{% trans %}What is a role?{% endtrans %}</h2>
<p>{% trans %}<em>Roles</em> are used to group and classify users; each user can be assigned one or more roles. There are also special roles for all anonymous and all authenticated users.{% endtrans %}</p>
<h2>{% trans %}What is a permission?{% endtrans %}</h2>
<p>{% trans %}Granting a <em>permission</em> to a role allows users who have been assigned that role to perform an action on the site, such as viewing content, editing or creating  a particular type of content, administering settings for a particular module, or using a particular function of the site (such as search).{% endtrans %}</p>
<h2>{% trans %}Overview of managing user accounts and visitors{% endtrans %}</h2>
<p>{% trans %}The core User module allows users to register, log in, and log out, and administrators to manage user roles and permissions. The core Ban module allows administrators to ban certain IP addresses from accessing the site. Depending on which modules you have installed on your site, the related topics below will help you with tasks related to managing user accounts and visitors.{% endtrans %}</p>