Title: default user role
Last modified: August 20, 2016

---

# default user role

 *  [donmatthew](https://wordpress.org/support/users/donmatthew/)
 * (@donmatthew)
 * [13 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/default-user-role/)
 * Hi everyone!
 * By some reason I can’t manage to change the default user role under settings -
   > general. Maybe because we’re using a plugin named “User role editor” (where
   you also can set the default role, but it doesn’t work)
 * So what I’m trying to do here is to add an action to change the default role 
   from author to contributor, but it still doesn’t seem to work.
 *     ```
       add_action('user_register','set_default_user_role');
   
       function set_default_user_role($user_id){
               $user = new WP_User( $user_id );
               return $user->set_role( 'contributor' );
       }
       ```
   
 * any ideas?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Moderator [bcworkz](https://wordpress.org/support/users/bcworkz/)
 * (@bcworkz)
 * [13 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/default-user-role/#post-3352778)
 * Try directly changing the value in the options table, it’s under the key ‘default_role’,
   use phpMyAdmin if necessary.
 * It’s disconcerting you can’t change this, are you logged in as administrator?
   Did someone accidentally change your capabilities? Can you change this if the
   plugin is deactivated? If it’s really a plugin issue, I would think the author
   would like to know about it.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘default user role’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [action](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/action/)
 * [capability](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/capability/)
 * [filter](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/filter/)
 * [role](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/role/)
 * [user](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/user/)

 * In: [Hacks](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/plugins-and-hacks/hacks/)
 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [bcworkz](https://wordpress.org/support/users/bcworkz/)
 * Last activity: [13 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/default-user-role/#post-3352778)
 * Status: not resolved

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