Chapter 3. Adding Users

You can't have a community website without users. Users set the tone for your site, commenting in forums, adding information, noticing mistakes, giving reviews, rating, and tagging. At the same time, allowing user accounts opens your site to spam, data risks, session capturing risks, and so on. Proper management of your user data can make your site resistant to common user permission and security issues.

In this chapter, you add users to Soups OnLine. First, you create user accounts and see how to prevent automated accounts from gunking up your database. Then, you add user authentication and session management to your Rails controllers. And finally, you examine user roles and how to implement them.