What's the current best practice for getting the userID from the sesson, and having it be part of every newly created/modified record? I have an app with a Club model and a People model, and a "membership" join table. class Club < ActiveRecord::Base has_many(:memberships) has_many(:members, class_name: 'People', through: :memberships) end I want all the tables, including the membership join table, to have a "creator" field that gets populated every time the record is created updated. I'd especially like to do stuff in my controller like the following: c = Club.find(name: => 'The Rubyists') c.members << People.find(name: ['Joe','Ann']) and have it populate the membership table correctly. Google has found me various articles/posts related to various versions of rails, some of which say something like "if you're doing this, you're Doing It Wrong", and many of which suggest putting information in a thread-local variable. I worry that some of these suggestions I've find make assumptions about how Rails works under the hood that may not hold true for every deployment method. Any ideas? In addition to general advice, I'd be interested in any gems that try to provide a solution to this. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/20141020133430.7107688da69493e2663876a4%40brisammon.fastmail.fm. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.