Assigning to Roles - Large Groups

Are you adding members via Administration > Membership > Roles > [select role] > Edit > Add members? If so, the "Select members" box allows multiple inputs so you can search and add many members at once.

Beyond that, where is the need to add these members being generated? is it through an event on Community or via some identifying information that Community tracks? There are possibly ways to accomplish your requirements through Automations - for instance, adding people to a certain role when they join a certain group - but I'd need more details on how the need to add lots of members comes about.

A good example of what we're trying to do would be adding all of our mechanical engineers to a high level mechanical engineering group. This group would sort of act as a distribution list for important news, calls for work, etc. so we need them to be members to ensure they get notifications. Right now we do this over e-mail, but it gets messy when someone has a question about what was sent out, replies to the alias, no one sees it, etc.

I have a list of the engineers with their e-mail addresses. I can easily match those up to real usernames, but unless I can copy/paste a comma separated list in it's a super time consuming effort.

A good example of what we're trying to do would be adding all of our mechanical engineers to a high level mechanical engineering group. This group would sort of act as a distribution list for important news, calls for work, etc. so we need them to be members to ensure they get notifications. Right now we do this over e-mail, but it gets messy when someone has a question about what was sent out, replies to the alias, no one sees it, etc.

I have a list of the engineers with their e-mail addresses. I can easily match those up to real usernames, but unless I can copy/paste a comma separated list in it's a super time consuming effort.

You could accomplish this with a custom widget that accepts a role selection and a list of email addresses in a text box, and adds each user found via email address to the role. Professional Services or a third party may have something like this, I'm not sure.

Enhancing the user lookup to accept comma-separated lists of emails/usernames (or provide an alternate way of mass input) would be a good candidate for our Ideas & Improvements list.

I'll drop the idea in the ideas area. Just being able to copy/paste a comma separated list of usernames would be a huge improvement!

And - Let me know if this is something professional services has or could do. I know we have some hours to use and this is something we'd really like.