I understand the function of the auth levels as they stand at the moment but I was wondering if the functionality of these auuth levels will be extended at some point.

What I am thinking of is something along the lines of selectively displaying some information on the roster based on the auth level of the client. An example of this would be displaying Officer Notes if the client was logged in as an Officer. Another might be to hide/show the rosterCP button in the utilities pane depending on your auth level.

Obviously to enable this sort of functionality would require some rewriting of the rosterCP interfaces for those components/addons that were affected.

Also, implementing this sort of feature would require an independent login interface.

There are currently no plans to extend the auth in Roster 2.0

However, we are working on a re-write of Roster codenamed R2 (this name be changed now since we called this release 2.0) which will include a full user auth system

Tying memberslist to the auth system so you need a certain auth level to see certain columns should be possible. However, it would again nearly double the size of it's config (2 config fields per setting instead of 1).