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@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! 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - Politicians are the opposite of pickpockets because you never see - - them take their hand out of your pocket. - - -- Larry Fine - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
