I am a newbie developer that together with Janina has taken on the unofficial Summer of Karrot, which is a DIY version of the Rails Girls Summer of Code (which we applied for, but we didn’t get selected). We’re staying in Kanthaus and getting Nick, Tilmann & Chandi to coach us through this new strange and exciting coding world. And we’re working especially on one feature that we would hereby like to introduce!
This feature has been requested among the foodsaving groups and it’s all about becoming selective.
Up until now, the joining process was either:
completely open, to anyone pushing the ‘join’ button:
kind of completely open, to those knowing the one password to join:
Now is time for a big change.
Your new members will have to apply, by answering whatever questions you wish to ask them, like here:
It will be your job as a team to deal with their application, by
writing words to them in the special applicant’s chat
accepting or declining each application, that will be displayed as a fancy new list
making them feel welcome!
This is basically the best we could think of, with our developing abilities, to give each one of you beautiful communities a big scary porter to only let the cool kids in. We’d be happy to receive any input, feedback, advice, requests. Just be kind, as you remember that we’re a team of unpaid, happy volunteers <3
where will I be able to write the question to newbies and where will the option the accept them appear? (i’m wondering because it is important to see if there is a new request, but also it should not become too crowded on the wall as a first page…)
Will there maybe be a mail to everybody with each new request (might be annoying, but also good to keep track)
The questions can be set in the group edit page.
When someone applied to your group there will indeed be a mail and on top of that another banner on the wall. I know that’s not ideal and we want to remove all the wall banners at some point but for now it seemed like the right way, because the banner only appears if there really is an application pending. If you click that banner you’ll reach a new page called application list, where you’ll find the buttons to accept and decline the applicant.
@tiltec there is the “applicant” role already?
I cannot find where or how to manage an settings about it, other than setting a certain password.
How does it work? Might be that it’s only live since you wrote it, and we didn’t have any new members in the last 3 days…
Ah yes, this hasn’t been clearly communicated yet: only new groups and groups that had a password before have been switched to applications; open groups stay open. The password feature has been removed.
It’s not easy right now to recognize if a group is open or require an application. If you’re not member, you see it on the group preview page:
Open group
Group with application required
If you’re member, you can see it in the group settings:
Inside group settings, if applications are enabled
We didn’t implement a toggle between applications enabled or disabled. My feeling is that switching between these states is a major change for the group and the implementation is not tested in this regard. Right now, I would accept requests to enable applications for a group, but not to disable them. (ping to @nicksellen@taistadam@djahnie if this seems reasonable?)
In near future, I could imagine three solutions:
all groups have applications enabled, except for the Playground
when creating a new group, you can choose between applications enabled or disabled
new groups always start open and members can enable applications at any time
In a more distant future, we could implement to allow groups becoming open again. This could require some collective decision making, like approval or voting.
I’ve been trying out this new feature, to see if it could replace our current registration system for new food savers here. I like it, but found that it still needs some minor adjustments.
I found a possible bug on the chat that I reported on Github. I also noticed that you can only see on the history the id of the user who accepted the applicant to the group. As a future improvement it would be nice to see clearly which user in the group accepted or declined an application.
