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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx , 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! -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
