Loomio
Fri 14 Aug 2020 8:35PM

People unable to join and rephrasing the main page

LS Leo Sammallahti Public Seen by 43

A fellow named Richard Hull said he tried to join but never heard back from us. He tried to rejoin today.

A friend of mine Sam Peters tried to join but couldn't do so because there's a character limit on the Open Collective profile part of the registration form that doesn't allow enough characters.

Social Coop might benefit from clearer roles. For quite some time I have raised the question of changing the wording of the main page to something more welcoming, but it seems it's not clear who is responsible for editing the main page. Anyone know who could do that?

Currently the page says:

"you may apply for membership on our instance via this link"

I think this can give a wrong impression. Perhaps "you are welcome to join our community!" could be better and more welcoming.

LS

Leo Sammallahti Fri 14 Aug 2020 8:37PM

I invited only few of the most active members to this thread, of course everyone is more than welcome to join the discussion. Thought it might be notification spam for many members.

NS

Nick Sellen Fri 14 Aug 2020 9:40PM

Yes, we became aware of an issue, probably/possibly relating to git.coop (GitLab) requiring some accounts we use for it to become verified. David had a look into it but wasn't able to resolve it yet, I think I can have a look tomorrow!

As for who can change that text, I'm not sure exactly who does or how that is handled, I have access for sure though, I'll just do it tomorrow as your suggestion sounds sensible!

It's often too easy to accidentally write overly bureaucratic sounding text in these boxes and forget there is a nice human reading it, so thanks for the attention to detail.

For server access in the tech group we started doing polls when we want to give people more access, perhaps that would be useful for mastodon admin access too.

LS

Leo Sammallahti Fri 14 Aug 2020 10:50PM

Much appreciated Nick :)

ED

emi do Fri 14 Aug 2020 10:58PM

Thanks for the alert Leo and for the response Nick! I've been on call this week and didn't see a registration come in from David Hull. There was one registration that came in from a user named Florian and their membership has been approved.

The character limit issue for open collective has been fixed I believe?

Our system was working rather smoothly until recently, so I believe once we figure out what has caused the 'break' we should be back in business regularly signing up new members :)

NS

Nick Sellen Sat 15 Aug 2020 10:21AM

I made some progress! @David Mynors had figured out the issue and manage to change the token that is used for creating the new user "issues", but the service needs a restart, and it's currently running in a way that does not make that easy, so I'm doing it properly and bringing into line... via https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/ansible/-/merge_requests/13

NS

Nick Sellen Tue 18 Aug 2020 7:19PM

Registrations are working again (You can see my test one created this issue https://git.coop/social.coop/community/operations/-/issues/258) :)

The way it was running wasn't really properly set up on the server, so it took some extra work to get that sorted, but it's quite nicely set up now.

@Leo Sammallahti I also updated the text on the site as you suggested, but maybe you want to check the whole wording, I just sort of shoe-horned the phrase you suggested into the existing text, but we can change it totally if you have a more welcoming suggestion!

LS

Leo Sammallahti Tue 18 Aug 2020 7:23PM

Thanks! Looks good :)