Transparency on an issue with denied applications

3 years ago by Gaywallet (they/it) to c/support

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.

woteorin 41 points 3 years ago

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.

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Lionir 36 points 3 years ago

I.. did assume that. Oh... That's not good.

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Lycan 18 points 3 years ago

When my application was accepted, I received an email letting me know.

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JaeSuis 15 points 3 years ago

Yeah, I only just discovered that I was accepted because of this post. 🤣

It's okay. I know stuff happens and that this place is actually ran by humans.

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woteorin 13 points 3 years ago

I just double-checked my spam filters real quick to be sure, but yeah. Nothing came through on the email I provided.

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teruma 11 points 3 years ago

+1 to not receiving an email on approval. Just waited and tried to login sometime later.

edit: I probably did not subit an email address when signing up.

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luckless 8 points 3 years ago

I also did receive an email of acceptance personally. So I guess it's hit and miss...

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alyaza 15 points 3 years ago

we're checking now, because this is obviously a big problem if people aren't reliably getting the emails. no ETA on anything further, but this really helps us get an idea of where the problem might be and if it's on our end or on lemmy's, or a combination of both.

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HrBingR 6 points 3 years ago

To be fair submitting an email address when signing up is optional, so there’s a good chance people forgot to add an email address. I got an email once I was accepted.

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Annies_Boobs 4 points 3 years ago

Hey there! FWIW I just signed up today and never received an email either. Not sure if it helps but I did use iCloud email relay for my sign up.

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JuniperusVox 11 points 3 years ago

Lol, yeah I waited a full 24 hours and was assuming I was denied since I received nothing. I decided to just try logging in this morning to see and lo and behold.

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friendbot 6 points 3 years ago

yeah happened to me too but very happy to be here!

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RovenOver 10 points 3 years ago

When I applied yesterday, I was pleased (privacy reasons) to see that email address was optional, so I didn't enter it. Later I realized that meant I wouldn't get a notification of acceptance or not. Less than 24 yrs later I was able to log in, so "yay". If I discover a benefit to providing my email, I'll do so, but for now it's nice to have the option to be stand alone.

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admin 9 points 3 years ago

One benefit is password reset/recovery.

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ashen 10 points 3 years ago

Same, haha! No notice of approval, but I was able to just log in after a bit. Happy to be here anyway, seems like a really nice place 😊

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alyaza 8 points 3 years ago

we have been assuming this but that issue, at least, is less of one because we've never approved a user in less than 24 hours. if someone isn't approved though they'll literally have to infer that, whereas they generally won't need to if we approve them

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woteorin 8 points 3 years ago

Yeah. I figured that the rejection case is the more concerning one on the whole, but I figure some extra data points can't hurt.

Plus, I figure there'll probably be at least a couple of folks like me who weren't sure if it would be rude to try logging in after waiting a bit if they didn't receive anything, so seeing other folks encountering the same hiccup might be comforting. :P

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alyaza 7 points 3 years ago

we do appreciate it a whole lot yeah. this kind of fucks up our whole system and has led to our first real backlog in users that we don't know what to do with, lol

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vraylle 7 points 3 years ago

Same...I also never received an email, but tried to log in after a while and that worked.

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fox 32 points 3 years ago

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.

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Face 15 points 3 years ago

Same here, this post is what prompted me to check in the first place.

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Zak8022 11 points 3 years ago

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!

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pitninja 7 points 3 years ago

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.

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Gaywallet 8 points 3 years ago

Yes we've opened up a bug report and started conversations about whatever build might be necessary. We want people to know why they were rejected and be able to reapply when appropriate

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Parsnip8904 3 points 3 years ago

Same with me. I didn't get anything. Tried logging in after half a day and it worked.

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Deebster 2 points 3 years ago

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 🙄

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alyaza 31 points 3 years ago

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.

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hiperviper 12 points 3 years ago

Thanks for the update and for the work that you do!

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alyaza 16 points 3 years 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

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alyaza 12 points 3 years ago

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

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frogman 12 points 3 years ago

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.

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Gaywallet 19 points 3 years ago

Yes this is referring to the questions asked when signing up. Because we've grown a lot in the last few days we're now being more selective on who we approve to ensure people are in tune with our ethos. This means we revised the questions and are looking more closely at how people are responding.

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frogman 10 points 3 years ago

thanks for clarifying

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ericjmorey 8 points 3 years ago

I'm just happy I got in before the bar was raised

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foopo666 1 point 3 years ago

Explains why I (I think? Since I don't get any message) got rejected. I know you guys have to be restrictive for various reasons but it might stifle growth in the long run since the average lurker is unlikely to write whole sentences for why they wanna join. Just my two cents.

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alyaza 1 point 3 years ago

I know you guys have to be restrictive for various reasons but it might stifle growth in the long run since the average lurker is unlikely to write whole sentences for why they wanna join

we are extremely fine with that, lol. we have 4,100 users right now and last week we had 700.

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Zak 4 points 3 years ago

You are posting from beehaw and this post is about kbin.social, a different server running different (but interoperable) software.

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Lionir 20 points 3 years ago

This post is actually about Beehaw, I am confused.

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Zak 8 points 3 years ago

You're right. I'm the one who's confused because I'm not used to where to look in the kbin UI to see where a post came from.

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HiImDannyGanz 3 points 3 years ago

which is even more confusing, because kbin.social (where I joined) just allowed me to register with my Google account, but it means that I can't access any other Federated servers which need an old school username and password...

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Rentlar 10 points 3 years ago

It sounds like Registration in full throttle! Good luck vetting all those applications.

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lodion 6 points 3 years ago

I love the transparency here, thank you.

I was accepted in the last 24 hours and received no email. This post had me check to see if I could log in, success!

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WhoRoger 4 points 3 years ago

I'd be curious to see what kind of applications you get that you turn down (aside of the obvious like when someone just types gjshshshdh in the box)

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JshKlsn 2 points 3 years ago

[deleted]

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alyaza 3 points 3 years ago

surprisingly no, but there have been some blanks or complete non-sequiturs

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alyaza 2 points 3 years ago

I’d be curious to see what kind of applications you get that you turn down (aside of the obvious like when someone just types gjshshshdh in the box)

right now we're not explicitly turning down any but at this point if you mention you're only here to replace reddit or that you were pointed here with no context you almost certainly won't get accepted

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TeaHands 3 points 3 years ago

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 :)

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alyaza 3 points 3 years ago

we put it out there on lemmy_support over on lemmy.ml and i think our bug report mentions it, but i'm definitely finite in my capacity to spread this around further. just no time between everything else

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TeaHands 2 points 3 years ago

Of course! Just trying to raise awareness that it's a thing for other servers too. Thanks for all your work!

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duskfall 1 point 2 years ago

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bassal 1 point 3 years ago

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Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our July 2023 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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