Author

Michael JasonSmith

Contact

Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>

Date

2016-02-25

Organization

GroupServer.org

Copyright

This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

This product supplies the code to allow a person to request membership of a private group, and to allow the group administrator to respond to the request, adding the person as a new member or declining the request. Only private groups have this feature:

• In public groups anyone can join, without needing the approval of an administrator.
• Only the members can see the existence of secret groups, so everyone has to be invited.

The request is made up of two parts: the request page is used to formulate the request, and the request notification that is sent to the group administrator.

The request page, request.html in the Group context, is shown to logged-in non-members when viewing a private group. To simplify the code, the sign-up system¹ is hacked on the front to ensure that the person requesting membership has a profile and is logged in. It is not pretty, and I am not proud. (The group-info viewlet² handles the linking to the request page.)

The person requesting membership has a chance to write a short message explaining who they are, and why they should become a member of the group. (It is a bit like an invitation in reverse ³.) This message is sent as part of the request notification.

The request notification is sent to the group administrator by the request page. It is made up of HTML and plain-text versions, supplied by the pages request_message.html and request_message.txt in the Group context. The notification introduces the supplicant, and links the group administrator to the page that allows him or her to respond.

Each page takes four parameters, passed as form-fields:

userId:

The identifier of the person making the request.

email:

The email address of the person making the request.

mesg:

The message that the person making the request wrote to the group administrator.

adminId:

The identifier of the group administrator receiving the request.

The response part of the system is made up of the response page and two different response notifications.

The Response page, respond.html in the Group context, is linked to from the member-management links on the Group page. The link has a very low weight (0) and is only shown when there are outstanding requests to respond to.

The Response page is modelled on the page that participants use to accept and decline invitations to join a group ⁴: it lists all the people who have requested membership, their messages, and for each gives the option of accepting or declining the request. Depending on the option selected the supplicant will receive one of two different response notifications.

If the group administrator accepts the request of the supplicant then the person is joined to the group, and he or she receives a Group Welcome notification⁵.

If the group administrator declines the request of the supplicant then the person is sent a decline message, provided by the pages decline_message.html and decline_message.txt in the Group context. Both pages take the same parameters as the request notification.

• Translations: https://www.transifex.com/groupserver/gs-group-member-request/
• Code repository: https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.member.request
• Questions and comments to http://groupserver.org/groups/development
• Report bugs at https://redmine.iopen.net/projects/groupserver