I kind of want to get the communities feeling on leaving registrations open. Do you want them to stay open, or do you think it was better when they were approval only?
Marking this post as NSFW, so only logged-in accounts can see it.
I kind of want to get the communities feeling on leaving registrations open. Do you want them to stay open, or do you think it was better when they were approval only?
Marking this post as NSFW, so only logged-in accounts can see it.
My feelings might be in conflict with the available evidence. I preferred the instance being approval only (but I also assume that also created a large admin burden, which is an important consideration).
Once approval was lifted I expected a bunch of disruption… however at least in the communities I’m following that hasn’t happened. Perhaps my fears were unfounded. If anything, it seems like conversation has potentially lessened at is late (or maybe the level is actually the same or even increased, but just split into more or different communities now?).
In any case, while I still like the idea of approvals being required, if I’m trying to be rational, maybe they weren’t actually providing much value compared to the effort that was required?
I think that approvals were very important once we were establishing the culture, but I think now that the culture is established things are running smoothly. The major issue with approvals is the lack of feedback as to whether you have been approved or not (since we don’t have an email server and don’t require email). So people just had to check back occasionally to log in and just cross their fingers to hope they were approved.
We’re not against setting things to approval only again if we feel that open registrations start to cause problems. For now, though, it seems like things are running fairly smoothly, even with open registrations.