Re: QA group joining process: new members cannot subscribe to list until approved
On 08/05/2016 12:48 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi folks! In an IRC discussion with a new member this morning, we
became aware of an issue (possibly some folks knew about this already,
but I didn't!) in the joining process. This is mostly of interest to qa
group moderators/sponsors, but I figured it can't hurt to make everyone
aware.
Recently, the Powers That Be have made it so you can't subscribe to
Fedora mailing lists until you're a member of the FAS 'cla' group
(which you become a member of by signing the contributor agreement)
*and* one other group. This requirement is intended to combat spam
coming from bots which just create new accounts, sign the CA, then
start subscribing to lists and sending out spam - that whole process
can be fully automated, and has apparently been a real problem. So the
intent is to make sure only people who've been made a member of a
'real' FAS group by some kind of human, non-automatable process can
join the lists.
When we wrote https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join , this wasn't the
case, and the idea was more or less that people should apply to the
group and *at the same time* join the mailing list and send a self-
introduction mail; the self-intro would show that they were a genuine
applicant, and moderators could approve their membership after seeing
the self-introduction mail. Since then we made it a bit more ambiguous
and made it so the self-introduction mail isn't required, but I still
tend to look for a self-intro mail before approving new members.
Obviously, with the new rules, many prospective members won't actually
be able to join the list and send a self-intro at all until we approve
their membership - they could only do so if they were already a member
of some other Fedora group.
So, I'm proposing we make a slightly tweaked process explicit. My
suggestion is that it should work like this:
1. Prospective member sends group membership application
2. A sponsor contacts the prospective member - usually by email, but
IRC is fine if both the prospective member and the sponsor happen to be
there - to confirm they're a real person, really interested in QA, and
they've read the Join page
3. If there's a positive response, the sponsor approves the membership
4. The member can now join the list and send a self-intro mail
(encouraged but not required, as now)
When contacting prospective members by email, sponsors should copy the
mail to qa-sponsors(a)fedoraproject.org , so other sponsors are aware
that the prospective members have been contacted and we don't get
duplicate contacts. If contacting *multiple* prospective members at
once with a single mail, sponsors should send the mail To: qa-sponsors@
fedoraproject.org and *BCC* the prospective members, so their email
addresses aren't disclosed to each other.
Does this all sound OK? If so, I can tweak the Join page a bit to
reflect this process, and maybe throw together a sponsor SOP for
sponsors. Thanks everyone!
Uh, wouldn't the addition of a "captcha" on the signup page make
joining up without requiring additional group memberships easier and
more bot-proof? That would also prevent the sponsors having to deal
with a slew of botted initial contacts.
Just a thought.
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