[....] [Administrator] [Forum Moderator] [Global Moderator]
What's the dots mean?
The dots are a member group, any member can request a member group that can be private or public.
If you would like to start a member group then let me know.
Please see SMF1.1:Membergroups or SMF2.0:Membergroups depending on the version of SMF you are using.
Contents
1 Edit Membergroups
2 Add Membergroup
3 Settings
3.1 Membergroup Management
Every member of a forum belongs to at least one membergroup. Forum permissions are given to membergroups. This means that the membergroups that users belong to determine what they can see and do on the forum.
A membergroup's permissions are determined by the administrator. An administrator can, for example, set which boards members from a certain membergroup can see, and whether those members are allowed to manage members. To assign membergroups, the administrator should go into the user's profile, into Account Related Settings, and they may set that user to a membergroup by selecting one from the drop-down list called Primary Membergroup.
Please be aware that SMF requires that you have at least one post count based membergroup. You can negate this, for the most part, by removing all of the post count based membergroups except for that one, required group. That one, remaining, membergroup can be given any name. Just ensure that the number of required posts, for that group, is 0 (zero).
From SMF Forums
As with all other group permissions, should a user belong to both a standard (non post count based) group and a post count based group, that user will have all of the permissions granted in either group. The best way to avoid confusion in this case is to set all permissions for post count based group(s) to "Disallow" (X). Once that is done, only the permissions given by the user's standard (non post count based) groups, which are set to "Allow" (A), will be used.