In Moodle, which roles appear as participants and which don't?

Please answer this question if you can, and then change the tag.

In Moodle 1.7 it seems that admins don’t show up as participants in individual Moodle sites. Are there any other roles that hide that way? Is it something we can turn on for a given role?

One use case we’re trying to solve is that we need to give dept. webtechs permissions to view, edit and update and assign roles to their class sites, but we don’t want all their names showing up in the Participants list and confusing the instructor.

Partial Answer: The reason the admins don’t show up as participants in individual Moodle sites is because of their permission Capabilities/moodle/site:doanything. Documentation of this permission can be found here.

As of 04-05-07 the documentation states:

This allows a user to execute all actions in Moodle in the given context (normally the whole Moodle system). This is a special capability intended for admins, since it overrides all other capability settings.

This also allows a user to browse every course without being required to enrol and without being listed as a course participant.

However, this is not exactly what we’re looking for because it does not allow a user to be hidden from the Participants list and have limited actions.

An identical feature request to our own was recently posted in the Moodle foums.