Why people are feeling so strongly against this? And who decides the user approval based on profile pic? when a user can choose or associate any pic with their account, and discourse even assigns an image based on the first letter? In our case there’s a questionnaire using custom fields that are to be filled by the user when signing up. And it’s based on that users are getting accepted.
You can see it this way that a user must be reviewed by multiple users… I want the opinion of others. E.g. In who wants to be a millionaire why is there an audience poll? Why aren’t they just pick someone randomly and ask only one person the answer is? We’re assuming that the audience is probably more sure. And in small communities, there’s not even a single staff except admin.
And in a way, I want to honor my community that they have a say about who gets to be a member of the community and also to have a sense that to be a part of this community is a privilege and they shouldn’t abuse it and always treat it as valuable and have certain control and say about who gets accepted or denied. In any case more people should be involved in the decision to deny or accept the membership request. @Mevo has perfectly understood my views.
And from my imaginary solution to this, a review page should be visible to TL2 and above users and there should be a poll that will be closed after a specified time (the polling system is already part of discourse). If discourse itself suggests doing a poll when selecting moderator or TL4 users then what’s wrong with involving users at the acceptance in community as well. I’m assuming that the new user will be happy that he won an election to be part of this community and would value their right to choose other users. It’ll be a small community of users who trust each other and they can freely share their views and find acceptance of their views, and issues will be discussed in a good manner. They will more likely have a certain respect for each other (because they’re here because somebody has voted for their acceptance in here) and some similarity in their objective of joining the community at least since everybody will have similarity in objective and purpose and to achieve that they share their views and thus people will be more tolerant to each other’s views as well and they will respect the community as well. I hope it works that way at least.
Anyways, If you think it isn’t useful to other people and can’t be part of discourse then it’s okay as well. I have just suggested something which would be useful and a requirement in my use case and not everybody’s use case can be same or similar and it can vary from community to community and even I would choose different options and choices on a case by case basis, If everybody’s use case was same then the discourse would have given just one choice how memberships should be handled and life would be more simple but discourse supports several of these use cases.
I hope I have not done some harm by sharing my use case and views. And please don’t be offended by anything, there’s nothing offensive that I’m suggesting. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t have to make sense. The community having a say in who gets to be a member of the community makes a lot of sense to me in my use case at least.