Kristin . . .
On Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:27:46 -0700, "Kristin Semmelmeyer"
<kristins1@...> wrote:
Hi, I'm wondering if there's a way to require that people interested in joining our group write to me, the moderator, and answer a few questions before they can join. ?
The short answer is yes, you can. See Bruce's post for a link to how to do that.
Before you do that, you should ask yourself if that's what you really want to
do. If it's just for spam prevention, there's another method that works well for
my 20 groups. What I refer to below is for spam prevention. If it's to keep the
group private, see my last paragraph only.
By requiring the prospective member to answer some questions, you will find out
if they're interested enough to bother answering the questions. You will lose
some interested people just because they don't like bothering with that (some
might see you as a heavy-handed group owner who micromanages the group, even if
you don't do that. Personally, if I'm interested, I will answer the questions,
but I do go into the group thinking it might be micromanaged.
There's not much benefit in just letting them click the join button and you
immediately approving their joining the group, so we let people join and they're
immediately members.
For spam control, we have our groups set to new member moderation (NMM), and you
can choose how many messages they need to have moderated and approved before
they go off NMM. After those 1, 2, 3, or 4 first posts that get approved, they
can post directly to the group without moderation. (Of course, you can moderate
ALL posts but in anything but a very small group, it can make you pretty busy
unless you have enough moderators to do that.)
Spammers won't likely want to bother with a questionnaire, nor will they likely
go learn enough about the group to make multiple coherent posts until they are
unmoderated. So we use the NMM as a spam prevention tool. Even with this, in our
larger groups of 2,000+ members, and our small groups too, we've only had a
couple of spammers try. They joined, made one attempt to make a post pertinent
to the group which was feeble, then tried to spam us, and they got banned, since
they were still on NMM. We had one join and immediately try to spam the group.
Because of NMM, they didn't get their post to the group.
What none of these measures will do, except moderating every post, is prevent
spam to the group when a hacker hijacks someone's email account (one who is not
NMM) and send spam to the group. It's very rare when that happens, and we put
that email account on full moderation, of course. We then try to contact the
person whose account was hijacked and work out the problem.
So there you have it, a few different ways of preventing spam, if that's your
intent. One thing a set of questions might do is, in a totally private group,
allow you to verify the person in some way that they are say, a victim of some
crime, or a patient with some disease, where you wouldn't want someone from the
general public to just join and see all the posts. In that case, a set of
questions, or some back and forth emails, might be the best way to handle a
prospective member.
Best wishes for you and your group,
Donald
----------------------------------------------------
Some ham radio groups you may be interested in:
/g/ICOM /g/Ham-Antennas/g/HamRadioHelp /g/Baofeng/g/CHIRP 
Kristin Semmelmeyer
Bruce