Is there a way to allow/require prospective new members to answer questions such as "Why do you want to be part of this group" etc. to help identify them as desirable members of the group?

We want to discourage potential spammers and group collectors and keep it to people who would be willing to take an extra step to prove they are worthy of our group.

Thanks!

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Not yet. We send a questionnaire in the pending member notice and require an email response. It’s not 100% effective.

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In our pending membership, we send a questionnaire to the pending subscriber asking about 5 questions: one of them being exactly what your question is; along with 'how did you hear about our group', do you own or have you previously owned a shih tzu', what is the age of your shih tzu'... then we say 'once we hear from you, we will approve your membership.

Cherrill? 
Be kinder than necessary; 
for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

On Feb 13, 2018, at 4:54 PM, Cherrill <cdjamieson@...> wrote:

In our pending membership, we send a questionnaire to the pending subscriber asking about 5 questions: one of them being exactly what your question is; along with 'how did you hear about our group', do you own or have you previously owned a shih tzu', what is the age of your shih tzu'... then we say 'once we hear from you, we will approve your membership.

As an email groups fan, why do you need to know this before approving the membership? Why not just ask them to introduce themselves in their first message and address these questions. And do you save this information?

One of the great values of email groups is the ability to lurk, to watch a conversation until you want to jump in. In this case it might be someone who is thinking of acquiring a shih tzu’

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
[email protected]

we want our group to be as safe as possible.? If a person is not willing to give us a bit of background info before we approve them, then we have no way of knowing whether they are truly interested in the group or whether they just want to get a bunch of email addresses.? If they don't have a shih tzu and are wanting to get one to find out what their nature etc is, then all they need to do in the questionnaire is tell us that.? We would prefer to have this information before hand rather than have to unsub them after they have been approved and had a chance to see our entire membership info.

Cherrill 
Be kinder than necessary; 
for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

As an email groups fan, why do you need to know this before approving the membership? Why not just ask them to introduce themselves in their first message and address these questions. And do you save this information?

[excess quote trimmed by moderator; quote format altered by moderator]

On Feb 13, 2018, at 3:13 PM, Richard Carlson <rich@...> wrote:

We want to discourage potential spammers and group collectors and keep it to people who would be willing to take an extra step to prove they are worthy of our group.

I was joining a bunch of timebank lists to day to invite people to join my new [email protected] list. I found myself not joining any list that wanted to approve of me. I don’t think you can determine whether someone is worthy by asking them to answer questions. And why ask them just to be asking or to see if they are “serious.”

For years I’ve used "moderate new members" so I can approve messages from new members. That way I can catch spam but also advise new members if they send messages that are possibly offensive or off topic. But on Yahoo this was a great pain because it took about 5 clicks and waiting in between to take them off moderation. It was easier to approve all their messages than to take them off moderation.

Groups has a wonderful option which is to moderate a certain number of messages (1-5, I think). When the set number have been approved, the member is taken off moderation automatically. I find this is enough to determine if the person is there to spam or to make trouble. No need to question their intentions or qualifications.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC

"Give someone a book, they'll read for a day. Teach someone to write a
book and they will spend a life-time mired in paralyzing self doubt."

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everyone has the right to do what they want in their own groups.? Our shih tzu group has been going for 14 years and is a small select group of people who are truly interested in this breed.

Cherrill? 
Be kinder than necessary; 
for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

Sharon's method leads me to channel my inner Groucho: “I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member”. It might work for you but not for us.

On Feb 13, 2018, at 8:35 PM, Richard Carlson <rich@...> wrote:

Cherrill is right, while allowing anyone to join and using the moderation status to vet them works for you we prefer to make sure they are willing to follow our rules and procedures and are going to participate properly for our group.

My question is how do you really know that by answering the questions — the answers are very easy to fake — that you are really screening out undesirables. You might also be screening out desirables. Or putting everyone to work that isn’t really producing the effect that you think it is — attributing success to a feature that doesn’t produce it.

It’s a research question. Have you tried it both ways?

Sharon
———
Sharon Villines, Washington DC
"Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers

The only reason I ask people to put down a reason for wanting to join our groups, is to know they are real people, and not a Spam bot. When we were actively using YG on a rare occasion a member's computer would get infected, and send out Spam to our members in our group. On those occasion I would tell the infected person on the side what was coming from their computer, and they needed to do something about it before sending any more posts to the group. If anymore Spam came from their computer, then they knew they were going to get kicked off the group. Once they got clean again, they could join the group again. I can't really remember a time when a person joined the group with the intentional purpose of Spamming the members or the group, so I think the practice of asking prospective members why they want to join a group is a good idea. I had to rely on YG to protect the group from bad things as much as they could, and I did what I could to help out the cause.

Don

everyone has the right to do what they want in their own groups.? Our shih tzu group has been going for 14 years and is a small select group of people who are truly interested in this breed.

Cherrill 
Be kinder than necessary; 
for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

One of my groups is restricted to paid up members of our club and we
need to confirm this before approving them. Another group is for TV
repair technicians and for health and safety reasons we need to confirm
they are reasonably qualified to work on these items.

Approving them and getting them to say who they are in their first post
(or moderating their postings) does not achieve our requirements as
they would be able to read messages and access files as soon as they
become members. All our content is available to members only and it is
important to keep this so.

A simple box to type a few words on the joining screen, like
Yahoogroups has, would solve most of these issues.

Dave

On 13 Feb 2018 at 18:44, Sharon Villines wrote:

As an email groups fan, why do you need to know this before approving
the membership? Why not just ask them to introduce themselves in their
first message and address these questions. And do you save this
information?

I agree with Don. Even just one question does the job.

I have thought from the start that this is a dangerous lack in groups.io as compared to FB groups. It would be great if someone would call this to Mark’s attention again in beta. I’m pretty sure it’s on trelllo but I think it really needs to be bumped up,

On Feb 13, 2018, at 11:14 PM, Dave Sergeant <dave@...> wrote:

One of my groups is restricted to paid up members of our club and we
need to confirm this before approving them. Another group is for TV
repair technicians and for health and safety reasons we need to confirm
they are reasonably qualified to work on these items.

Approving them and getting them to say who they are in their first post
(or moderating their postings) does not achieve our requirements as
they would be able to read messages and access files as soon as they
become members. All our content is available to members only and it is
important to keep this so.

A simple box to type a few words on the joining screen, like
Yahoogroups has, would solve most of these issues.

Dave

[excess quote trimmed by moderator]

Richard,

... we prefer to make sure they are willing to follow our rules and
procedures and are going to participate properly for our group. Yahoo
has a feature to allow just that type of thing and I was hoping that
io Groups did too as it has been very helpful for us.

Which Y!Group feature are you referring to?

As mentioned earlier in this thread Groups.io does have the automatic notice sent to Pending subscribers feature. It is sent from the group's +owner address, and replies by the prospective member go to the +owner address. Does that do what you want?

Groups.io does not yet have a web-based fill-in box, but I don't know how useful Yahoo Group's feature of that type is, when there's no custom question asked.

Shal

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 11:38 pm, Shal Farley wrote:

Groups.io does not yet have a web-based fill-in box, but I don't know
how useful Yahoo Group's feature of that type is, when there's no custom
question asked.

At some point in my YG group, to keep the focus on the group subject, we started to restrict memberships. In our website and on the group page we stated clearly that only subscription requests with a short introduction were accepted.
Members wishing to join the group used the Yahoo box to introduce themselves and explain in a few words why they were interested in the group.
Pending members with no description were contacted by the moderator in charge and kindly asked to come out of the dark.
It worked well.

Marina

Hopefully this feature gets implemented soon!

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Let’s post about this on beta to show Mark how pressing this need is.?

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