Departments and approvers: why content can get stuck with nobody to approve it
A department with zero approvers isn't a warning — every article it owns is permanently unapprovable until someone is appointed.
An article's approval gate checks one thing: does the approver belong to the department that owns this content. That check is only as good as the department-and-approver table behind it, and this screen is the only place that table can be edited at all.
The number this screen exists for is a zero
Every department is listed with its approver count, sorted so the zeroes come first — because a department with zero approvers means every article its sources own is now permanently unapprovable, and the refusal a reviewer sees elsewhere gives no hint why. This screen is where that "why" actually lives.
A department can also show as orphaned — approvers appointed to it, but no source actually owned by it — which is the same underlying mismatch from the other side. Both are worth checking after renaming a department anywhere in your organization.
The match is exact, on purpose
A source's owner and an approver's department are compared ordinally — no case-folding, no trimming whitespace. "Welfare " with a trailing space is a second, invisible department that nobody can ever approve for, and it looks identical to the correct one on any screen that doesn't show both sides together. This screen exists specifically because that mismatch is otherwise undetectable.
Appointing an approver
Pick a department, pick a person from your staff roster, and appoint them. Two refusals are built in rather than left to a failed save:
- You can't appoint yourself. An administrator who could grant themselves approval rights in every department would make the whole maker-checker split self-issued, so you're simply absent from the list of people you can appoint.
- A grant naming someone your roster doesn't recognize renders with a visible warning rather than a name — it grants nobody anything, but it's shown rather than silently dropped, so you know to clean it up.
Names come from your staff directory, not from a copy stored on this table — so a person's display name is always current, and renaming someone doesn't require touching every department they approve for.
Demoting an approver
Removing someone's approval rights for a department is a single action from the same row they're listed on — no separate screen, no confirmation dialog, because taking away a permission is the lower-risk direction of this particular decision.