We have never had to review any new members that joined, but we have started having to review and manually approve new members. The admins have not made any changes to settings. This started happening yesterday. Hoping for advice on how to fix this. Thanks so much!
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around an issue where new members are being automatically placed in a review queue for approval, despite the site not having previously required such reviews. HSMMJ reports this change began recently, with no known configuration changes. jimkleiber suggests it may be due to a stricter enforcement of the must_approve_users setting, referencing a post by Sam Saffron that emphasizes explicit approval for all users, regardless of invitation type. agungor notes a potential issue where staff-invited users via specific email addresses might also be affected, which could be an unintended edge case. jimkleiber clarifies his understanding of the change, hoping it applies only to anonymous invite links. dax later confirms the issue has been resolved, as the must_approve_users setting has been disabled since 2019, and tests show invitations are now working properly. HSMMJ thanks the contributors for their assistance.
I think it may have to relate to the “must approve users” option that just got enforced more strictly on invites.
See below:
One tricky side effect of this, if I understand correctly, is that staff invites issued to a specific email address will no longer be automatically approved on an instance with must_approve_users. I think this is not ideal, since staff’s inviting a specific user is implicit approval. That said, I understand the decision.
Yeah, the way I thought the change would work is making it so that one has to explicitly click approve on all users who joined through an anonymous invite link, not an invite that was tied directly to a specific email address. That those invites with specific email addresses would not override the must approve users. At least that’s how I interpreted the intent, I could be wrong on that and/or it could have been implemented differently. Maybe what I’m talking about are the edge cases that Sam mentioned not wanting to deal with.
@HSMMJ I think the problem you encountered has already been fixed with a recent deploy of your site considering that the site setting must approve users is disabled since 2019.
I did some tests with the invitations on your site and everything seems to work properly now.
Please contact us if any user should end up again in the review queue for the approval by the staff.
Thank you so much for your help, @dax , @jimkleiber , and @agungor !