About two days ago we found a bug with the registration system on lemmy. Because of this we have updated our registration process a few times, and cannot deny any applications as the person registering does not receive any message and cannot re-apply.
We currently have several hundred people that we are waiting to deny, and some unknown amount of people that we denied prior to finding this issue which we would really like to contact and give them a chance to register as they didn’t write enough in their registration for us to really evaluate if they were a good fit for this instance.
If you’re a developer please take a look at this github issue and please work your magic to help fix this problem.
As an aside, we also have a list we’ve been working on for enhancements that would make moderating and administering this instance a lot easier, and enhancements we think users would enjoy in terms of UI and UX. We’d love to share these as well as facilitate a discussion to surface more ideas (and we plan to in the future), but right now we need to focus on the most pressing issue to us running this website, whether people can create an account here and participate.
Likely need to define some basic rbac controls. They signed up, sure, and have an initial role of “pending”, but don’t receive a “user” role until after approval. Then in the home page, when signed in, they get a banner saying they’re still in pending and will not be able to post or comment.
The major concern will be retroactively applying user roles to the existing users.
I’m a fan of this approach. That way, we can return a 200/201 on subsequent registrations for the case where an attacker would query if a user name already exists on an instance. If rejected, remove the account. If accepted, add the user role.