How to update the role/status of several users automatically

A)  We have used an “extra option” in the user registration form to ask all users if they want to be reviewers for our conference. How can we now give all these users the reviewer status easily?

B)  We want to give all authors the reviewer status. Our submission process has already ended. Is there a way to do this automatically?

C)  We created a list of users that are supposed to get the status “reviewer” or “PC member”. How can we now give all these users this status automatically?

You can use the import function to set the users status/role of several users in one go. To create the list of users, please use the export function and tools like Excel or Libre Office.

A)  A custom field in the user registration form cannot be processed by the system automatically. Therefore you need to use the export and import functions for your purpose.

• Please go to
  Overview => Data Import and Export => Export Data
  and export all registered users with all user details from the ConfTool database (see image 1).
• From this exported list, please create a new list and filter only the user IDs where the status "Yes" for your custom reviewer question was selected. Save this list as CSV file.
• Then please go to
  Overview => Data Import and Export => Import Data
  and enable the expert settings in the lower navigation bar by clicking on "Expert Settings Disabled" or the cogwheel. This gives you additional options for importing data.
  
  Now please select your file to import and use the import mode “Update existing user data by user ID” (see image 2).
  
  Then please assign the column “personID” to the column of your import list (see image 3). In the next step set the required user status for all imported users, e.g. “reviewer” (see image 4).

B)  You can follow the same procedure explained in example A) with the difference that you might export only the authors and not all registered users as a first step (see image 5) and that you can directly export the data as CSV file, as you won’t need to process / filter it in Excel first.

C)  You can use any manually created list as a source and import it to the ConfTool database. It just needs to be a CSV file. Please follow the same procedure explained in example A) from step 3. on.
Please note that you can also use a list of email addresses or user names for the import and give these users the required user status, e.g. “reviewer” or “pc member” when you use the corresponding import option in step 1 of the import process (see image 2).