Why We Approve New Members Before They Join

[Kevin Latham]

Many of you might be wondering why we have the "Approve new members before they can join" option set. A while back we got flooded with spammers joining and spreading some inappropriate content. It took quite a bit of time to clean up the mess. One of the social networks we setup for a sister site was so overwhelmed by this inappropriate behavior we just pulled the plug on the whole thing. This was not the fault of Ning or how Ning works, it was just some bad people doing bad things. So from then on we started to approve who joins the network. We realize its an inconvenience, but after the mess we went through, we thought it the best option. Just about everyone gets approved, and hopefully within a day we get notice.