Managing editors control the entire effort in a distributed-but-equal fashion by consensus. Any managing editor can make decisions that affect the entire project. For this reason, the ``college of managing editors'' must be small and cohesive.
Managing editors receive mail whenever a guest tries to register. Through a Web form, managing editors can decide whether to accept the registration, to send further questions to the guest, or to deny registration. When a guest is allowed to register, the managing editor decides what level of engagement is appropriate.
It is not reasonable to remove a participant from the list, especially after the participant has entered translations. Complete removal of a participant would make it impossible to present information about those translations. Instead, managing editors may set any participant to ``inactive'', which leaves the database record for that participant intact but prevents the participant from modifying the database further.
Managing editors respond to requests for regions of the text to allocate. All managing editors get mail whenever a translator requests an assignment. Managing editors use graphical tools to discover what regions of the text are still available for translation and assign accordingly. Generally, assignments are contiguous ranges within a single alphabetic letter. The software prevents new assignments from overlapping existing assignments.
The site administrator at the computer that hosts the SOL project has de facto privileges, of course, beyond even those of managing editors. The administrator can make any modification whatsoever to the databases, deleting or changing translations, participant engagement, and so forth. We therefore trust the administrator not to act hastily and to protect the data. All data are automatically backed up daily as part of the host site's ordinary maintenance.