Administration

A wiki needs looking after as well as writing. Someone has to decide who gets an account and what they may do, check that the backups are working, help the colleague who is locked out, and notice when something looks wrong. In Tesria all of that happens in one place, the Administration area. If you have just become the administrator of your team’s wiki, this section walks you through it screen by screen: what each one is for, when you would use it, and how.

Administration is for administrators and the owner of the instance. Anyone else who opens it is told to ask an administrator. Before you start, Owner, administrators and users explains who may do what; the rest makes more sense once you know.

Opening it

Choose Admin in the top bar. In a narrower window it moves under More, and on a phone it is in the ☰ menu.

It opens on the Dashboard, with a row of tabs across the top. You only see the tabs your role allows. An administrator on a new instance sees every one except Branding, which belongs to the owner. At the foot of every tab is Tesria’s version number, the first thing to quote when you ask for help.

What each tab is for

• Dashboard: the instance at a glance. How many people use it, how much has been written, and whether the backups are running.

• Users: every account. Help someone who forgot their password, lost their phone or is leaving the team.

• Spaces: every space, including private ones. Publish a space to the internet, or get into one nobody can manage any more.

• Invites: links that let one person create an account, for when anyone-can-join is off.

• API tokens: every API token, whose it is and how much it is used, what AI assistants did with theirs, and revoking one.

• Security: what Tesria has noticed, such as repeated wrong passwords, and the switches and limits that protect the instance.

• Backups: whether the backups work, and backing up or testing a restore now.

• Roles: what each role may do, as a grid you can change.

• Groups: named sets of people, so a space can be shared with a whole team at once.

• Audit: the record of who changed what, and when.

• Settings: the instance’s name and address, which sites may be embedded, who can join, and the email server.

• Branding: your organization’s name, logo and colors. The owner’s, unless they share it.

• About: this version of Tesria, supporting it, everything it is built from, and a check for known vulnerabilities.

Your first week as administrator

Nothing here is urgent on day one: Tesria works out of the box. But these are worth doing early, roughly in this order.

1. Check the backups. Open Backups and make sure both cards say Healthy. Choose Test restore of newest once, so you know a backup really comes back. Then plan an offsite copy, because every backup starts on the same machine as the wiki.

2. Turn on two-factor for yourself. An administrator’s account is worth more to an attacker than anyone else’s. See Two-factor and recovery codes.

3. Decide who can join. A new instance lets anyone who can reach it create an account. For a team wiki on the internet, turn that off in Settings → Access and add people with Invites instead.

4. Set the public address and email. In Settings, put the address people use to open Tesria, set up the mail server, and send yourself a test email, so alerts and password reset links can reach people.

5. Look at the roles. Open Roles and either keep the defaults or change them. Most teams keep them.

6. Make groups for your teams, so spaces can be shared with a team rather than person by person.

When Tesria asks for your password again

Some actions change who can run the instance, or cannot be undone. Before those, Tesria shows a box called Confirm it’s you and asks for your password, or a code from your authenticator app if you use two-factor. It only asks when you have not entered your password in the last few minutes, so you will not see it twice in a row.

It guards, among other things: changing someone’s role, turning off someone’s two-factor, publishing a space, switching public spaces on or off, changing what a role may do, changing the backup retention policy, unblocking an address and changing the branding. The point is simple: if you leave your computer unlocked, nobody passing by can make you an accomplice.