"Request" a membership...stupid!

[medikation65]

Hey all,

I'm going to try not to sound bitter, but I'm SICK of the "click here to REQUEST a membership. what is with that?! What am I applying for a job or something? That's the beauty of these Yahoo groups, they're free! Why make people do this? Then you DO do it, and you never hear back from the moderator, or you do like a YEAR later. I'm sick of it. And I'm not bothering with it anymore. If it doesn't say "to BECOME a member" then I'm not bothering.

Anyone else?

 

[Hawaiian Prince]

at the same time. I started a pittsburgh tickling group with no membership requests. What do I have.... 900000000000 spam posts and a membership that's 90% not from pittsburgh

 

[Yet_One_More_Idiot]

Some people just use the moderator's veto on new memberships to block spambots which try to sign up; others use it to keep out those would-be potential trouble-makers. Either way is fine, as long as they respond (positive or negative) to all membership requests in a reasonable time frame.

I know of one celeb feet group which required moderator's approval for new memberships, where he was saying "send me 5 celeb feet pics with your membership request" and then unilaterally ignoring all membership requests; he was just using it to build his own collection of celeb feet pics, without the hard work of having to find any of them himself.

 

[PhoenixMacGyver]

The only thing I ever request is onion rings instead of french fries at Burger King.

 

[Kalamos]

Mmm... I used to have a "request membership" mechanism on my group, a while ago.
I didn't know what to expect, so I wanted to screen people for a while, before letting complete strangers in.

At first it was fun: you see, while for some users it is just a wasteful hassle, for admin/mods it's a quick and easy way to know how users feel like. To gauge newcomers.
People actually sent congrats and compliments over - it felt good.
I usually answered within a week.

Then, for some reason, the mail approval system failed on me: some people never got their authorization to join; maybe they had strong antispam filters. Maybe the server bot crashed once too many.

It felt as if I were keeping perfectly "innocent" and "eligible" people out.

...

I eventually turned the whole mechanism off, and let people join as they saw fit.
If they were in just for the loot, they could grab it pronto.
If they wanted to do more, they had the option to.

I only left a medium moderation filter, barring people to post their first message/file until I get to review it.
It's a sound way to keep spam out, without actually curtailing users' freedom to download/upload.

...

Some use the "request membership" switch to keep minors out, or so they claim.
Many ask users to fill the Yahoo profile out - with personal infos and maybe a photo.

I once complained over it with a group mod, and we settled for a simple drawing, instead of a personal pic.

I'm surprised that Yahoo groups can't come up with something more refined than Adult vs non-Adult, though.

...

Hope my personal experience helped a bit.