Hey everyone

We recently discovered that the end-user experience around denied applications is a bit confusing and perhaps in need of some work. As best as we can tell, if we deny an application there is no notification nor a reason displayed to the person who’s been denied. We don’t want this experience happening to anyone we deny (it’s not particularly nice to ghost people!) and we expect that many of the denied applications are great people who are just in a hurry and not writing enough for us to assess if they’re a fit for our ethos, so we wanted to make this post for anyone who tried to register and is confused about what happened or anyone still yet to register.

When registering, please answer the questions in full as it helps us to understand if you’d be a good fit here. We created a post in lemmy support to get some clarification on this issue, but we’re not sure how long it will take to resolve or what changes we may need to do to our process.

  • Just out of curiosity, are y’all also assuming there’s a notification sent out on approvals? Because I definitely waited a bit to see if there was a message indicating if I’d been accepted or not and then just decided to try logging in to see what happened and nothing ever popped up.

  • I provided an email address on signup. After like a half hour I tried logging in and it just worked. Just double checked my email account and nothing came through saying I was approved.

    • Wow, so glad I came back to look around. I was wondering if something went wrong with my request since I hadn’t heard anything at all. But here I am, logged in. Yay for me. Thank you!

    • Email would be the obvious way to contact most people and it should be used, but (at least on lemmy.ml) email isn’t required to create an account.

      For people who were rejected and don’t have an email associated, I do think it would be wise to implement some sort of login flow that could lead back to a set of follow up questions and/or a notice of outright rejection.

    • I did get an email saying “Your registration application has been approved. Welcome to beehaw.org!”

      The email was delivered despite that I’m using greylisting (which means my mail server says “I’m too busy” the first time a new mail server sends something to filter out spammy fire-and-forget mailers).

      Edit: email was sent Sat, 03 Jun 2023 11:38:10 +0000

      Edit2: I’m way too late to be helpful 🙄

  •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
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    okay, so to quickly summarize since we’ve now got a pretty good idea of what’s going on:

    • all future approvals, if you provide an email in your registration, should get an email approval now. it should show up in your Gmail with no issues. this was on our end because of some configurations we didn’t make before now, and we fixed it. go us!
    • however: we are kind of shit out of luck with denial emails. Lemmy doesn’t send these at all–it is literally not a feature–and we can’t do anything about that. apparently you’re supposed to be able to log in and get a denial reason but as far as we can tell that does not universally work, meaning some people are unambiguously fucked. we’ve opened a bug report covering this.

    so yeah. that kind of fucks with what we were doing, and i don’t know what the best way moving forward is going to be here.

    i will once again reiterate that if you want to be allowed into the community while this is all the case, please answer the questions in full when you go to register, and please understand we are not super interested in people who just want to replace Reddit with something else or have been directed here and don’t engage with the sidebar or philosophy we’re going for.

  •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    in the interim: we’re making it so you need to register with an email, and hopefully this will make it more likely you actually get one if it’s hit and miss. we recognize this sucks for a few reasons, but we’re trying to manage this with what we have, and that’s one of the few things we can do as an immediate solution.

    please continue to check regularly, and please please answer the questions in full when you go to register if you are reading this. we cannot stress enough that we have no good ways of assessing who you are but the entry question, and our community is already quite large and not necessarily in need of people that are only seeking Reddit But Elsewhere.

    update: see here for the resolution as of now

    •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
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      update: we now have a better and much more idea of where the issue is. we primarily 100% think it is an issue affecting Gmail users, which unfortunately is a lot of people. this also means email registration isn’t going to be super helpful either way, so we’ve reversed that and i don’t think we’ll reinstate it any time in the future. we are now working on what we can do to fix this one, so hopefully this won’t be a problem in the days to come.

      our exhortation to please please answer the questions in full when you go to register if you are reading this remains in effect, until we can reliably get approvals and denials to people.

      update: see here for the resolution as of now

  • i didn’t fully understand that there was an application system, do you mean the “why beehaw” question on the sign-up page? 👀

    i didn’t add an email either but i feel like i missed some steps cause there wasn’t exactly a questionnaire. i just pressed sign up, went to the bathroom, then signed in and it was all good.

  • Thanks for the confirmation that there was something going on with Gmail, that makes a lot of sense. I raised it on my instance too (lemmy.world) and turns out we had the same problem.

    I don’t know if there’s any central communication between instance admins but it might be putting the word out for everyone to check their settings in case this is happening on others too :)