Book Club Overview

You can use Stump to host your own book club! This guide will overview how this feature works, what functionalities are available, and walk you through the process of setting up a book club in Stump.

Basic requirements

To set up a book club in Stump, you'll need:

• A Stump instance
• A managed user account (otherwise, it would be a club of one)

You don't even technically need any books on the server to start a book club, either, since you can create book club schedules with 'external' books.

How it works

Book clubs in Stump are effectively just a group of users that all have access to special pages and functionalities that are only available to members of a given book club. There can be multiple book clubs in a single Stump instance, and users can be members of multiple book clubs.

RBAC and Book Clubs

There are two relevant user permissions that affect access to the book club feature as a whole:

1. Any managed account with the bookclub:read permission may access the book club feature. This means that they can view and join book clubs
2. Any managed account with the bookclub:create permission may create book clubs (and therefore inherently has the bookclub:read permission)

The server owner can assign these permissions to other users in the user management settings page. For more information about that process, see the user permissions guide.

Book Club Roles

Within a book club, there are 4 roles:

1. Creator: The creator of the book club. They have full control over the book club, and can delete it at any time
2. Admin: Admins have the same permissions as the creator, except they cannot delete the book club
3. Moderator: Moderators have management permissions over the chat boards
4. Member: Members have no special permissions within the book club

The server owner retains all of the permissions as a creator of any book club that exists on the server.

Custom roles

Book clubs can create custom names for each of the four available roles. This was added to better support book clubs that want some themed and/or immersive names for their roles. For example, a book club that reads primarily D&D books might want to rename the roles to Dungeon Master, Adventurer, Explorer, and Novice. Internally, nothing changes, but the names are displayed in the UI accordingly.

Book schedule

The book schedule is an ordered list of books that the book club will read. In general, each book in the schedule will have:

• A start date
• An end date
• A book (either an internal book or an external book)
• A discussion board dedicated to that book

If a start and end date is not provided, Stump will try to infer a reasonable start and end date based on the previous book's end date, or use the default interval defined for the book club (defaulting to 30 days of reading and 2 days of discussion/break if unset).

Who can see the book schedule?

The book schedule is visible to all members up to the current book only. This means that members can only see the current book and any books that have already been read. The club creator and admins can see the entire schedule.

Please note that this in particular is being considered for configuration in the future, so a club creator may be able to configure this behavior, instead.

Book suggestions and voting

Stump supports an informal voting system for members to suggest books for the schedule. When a book is suggested, it is highlighted alongside other suggested books, and members may like the suggestion. The creator or admins of the club can then choose to quick add the book to the schedule, or add it to the schedule with a custom start and end date.