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The practical facts about our new system for membership by 'invitation only'.

  
  

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Olulabelle
17:29 / 17.02.05
HOW DO I JOIN BARBELITH?

The simple version:

Send an email to barbelith.apply@gmail.com

Do one of the following:

Email from an account based at an established, verifiable institution (business, school, college etc).

If you are using a free or ISP-based email, demonstrate that it can be connected to an established web presence elsewhere (eg, a blog).

If an existing Barbelith member is vouching for you, include their Barbelith username so that that can be confirmed via PM (private message) or email.

[ADDED 26 JUN 06]
-----

The details:

IMPORTANT: If you are reading this thread because you wish to join Barbelith please note the following:

We are receiving a lot of applications from free email addresses. Do not apply using a free email address such as hotmail, gmail or yahoo unless you have a blog or website, make a regular contribution to another messageboard with a profile that features your email address, or appear in detail on a work/college/school site. We will not be able to consider you, regardless of how much you write, or how interesting it is!

If you do not have any web presence at all, you must apply using an email address using your real name which belongs to your work, college or school. Currently we cannot consider you if you don't.

Thank you. Please also read the rest of the thread.
[ADDED BY OLULABELLE, 27TH MAY 2005.]

------

Discussion & elaboration follows:

I thought I should start this thread for information on the collating of potential new Barbelith members which I am undertaking for submission to Tom on a (probable) fortnightly basis. I've put it here as threads stay near the top for longer than Conversation and also so we can discuss what reply messages should say.

Amended as of 4th August 2005: please email barbelith.apply@gmail.com in order to apply for barbelith membership. Please put the name of the applicant (whether that is yours or someone else's) in the subject of the email. Thanks.

Any new member suggestions should be sent to this address with a line or two saying why they should be accepted. (Is that right?) I've had one submission and two unsolicited requests already. (Yay!) They were really nice to read, and personally I would be happy to submit all three of them.

I'm going to show Haus as per Tom's thread in conversation and if he agrees with me I'll add them to the submission list ready to go to Tom in two weeks time.

With regard to reply messages, shall we try and write something we all agree on, or shall I just reply myself? I don't mind doing that, but perhaps standard text would be better.

I don't imagine we'll have many (any) submissions that we want to turn down, but we may get a few unsolicited ones, so maybe we should have something ready I can reply with.

For unsolicited potential members, I think that if these people have gone to the bother of following the threads, finding the email address for consideration and sending us a message then we should do them the courtesy of considering them. Otherwise Barbelith might become a bit of a 'friends only' clique. I think unsolicited potential members should write a bit more on who they are and why they want to join; I don't mean an essay, just a few facts. For example one of the people emailing this evening came across us while writing a dissertation, already plays Kingdom of Loathing and has a blog which is linked to in the mail.

Doing this makes me really happy, I think it's really exciting for Barbelith to get mails from people who sound ideal for the board and I think this idea is going to work very well.


What say you?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
18:53 / 17.02.05
I think you've finally sold me on it. I'm requesting to have my vote removed in the voting thread.
 
 
Olulabelle
20:46 / 17.02.05
Our Jedi mind-tricking is working, it is.

Person 4 has applied. Obviously I won't do this for evey application we get, it's just to keep you all updated at the beginning as to numbers.
 
 
Loomis
21:09 / 17.02.05
Keep mentioning them, olulabelle. We need to keep track of how many candles to buy.
 
 
Olulabelle
22:23 / 17.02.05
Kay, two more. One has posting on another board as a reference so we can check out the posts this person has made but they have a g.mail account which is 'against' the rules.
 
 
Tom Coates
07:09 / 18.02.05
I would have preferred to have kept this in private messages and from recommendations from established users at this stage, to be honest, while we work out the logistics of the proper open-to-general-public version. I was probably unclear in the original thread. Still, I'm comfortable with this if everyone else is, and I guess we'll see what happens...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
07:13 / 18.02.05
I think it's going to be really interesting to see how many people apply. If you've already had six then I reckon you might be calling on others to help quite soon but in a way the more perfect people sound for the place the more I'd check them out. If I was Andrew and wanted to get back on to barbelith (and potential member I'm not saying you are) than I'd tell you I was writing a dissertation and playing Kingdom of Loathing... mostly because it's believable but it would make a lot of us smile and bounce in our seats. Okay, I didn't bounce.
 
 
Tom Coates
07:20 / 18.02.05
In terms of the Barbelith e-mail, I was thinking of something pretty simple like this:

Hi,

We would like to invite you to become a member of Barbelith.com.
To sign-up for the site and start posting immediately, all you have to do now is...

{etc}

Please make sure that you familiarise yourself with the community's background before posting by reading the FAQ: http://www.barbelith.com/faq/

If you wish to introduce yourself to the board in general, then there is normally an 'Introductions' thread running in The Conversation at any given time. The Conversation is also for chatty and informal threads. If you have a question about board etiquette or just want to start posting, then it's a good place to start.

Please remember to try and keep your posts in the rest of the board on topic and thoughtful and try and play nice or we'll break your legs and boot you off the board.

Enjoy!
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
20:22 / 10.03.05
Is this still the ongoing board-getting-on-to plan? Is the barbelithmembers@ioddia.com email still the one to use? What's the state of play? Will Brad discover Tawni's infidelity? Is Gavin really a robot?
 
 
Olulabelle
22:48 / 10.03.05
Yes. Tune in next week for the next installment.

Sent the list off to Tom this eve and it had *quickly checks the email account* 15 names on the list.

We already have 6 more which will (if all OK) go forward in the next round.
 
 
Tom Coates
16:05 / 14.03.05
Invitations have now been sent out.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
06:02 / 15.03.05
Please do keep giving us the updates if you could, olulabelle- I think it's important that we know how well this is working (which it seems to be so far, yay!).
 
 
Olulabelle
12:06 / 15.03.05
Well it looks like it's going OK, the people who applied and had acceptable email addresses/blogs/proof of identity are joining and posting which is really cool.

We've had about 10 more applications since the last lot so in a couple of days I'll look through them, check their links and send them on to Haus to look at. Then we have another week or so before I send them all on to Tom again.

Mostly we are getting unsolicited submissions although we have had a couple of member submissions too.
 
 
Tom Coates
18:16 / 23.03.05
I'd be interested to know if people are getting any more applications for membership since I posted the thing up on my site.
 
 
Olulabelle
13:07 / 24.03.05
We have about one a day I think. I'll check when I get home.
 
 
Olulabelle
21:23 / 30.03.05
N-e-w-s U-p-d-a-t-e:

We have had forty one applications for membership since the last list I sent to Tom and I am going through them now, checking their links and email addresses and making a list for Haus.

But I may be some time.

Why is it people who wish to join Barbelith write such long and interesting accounts of themselves?

*a/ We're all self-obsessed.
*b/ We attract the sort of people who tend not to write one word where lots of juicy ones will do.
*c/ We're so insular that people are feeling they have to over-justify their wish to join.
*d/ We're so fabulous people are prepared to put the time in, in order to be asked to join.
*e/ There's a big joke site elsewhere on the net set up entirely to take up Haus's time with checking potential members, in order that he won't post anything interesting here.

*Delete as appropriate.
 
 
TeN
02:20 / 31.03.05
you mean you've never been to www.bigjokesitesetupentirelytotakeuphausstimewithcheckingpotentialmembersinorder thatwedontpostanythinginterestingonbarbelith.com? I thought everyone had seen it by now.
 
 
Tom Coates
07:39 / 07.04.05
Any news on this - it seems to be taking a very long time. It's fine if it does take a long time, unless that's symptomatic of it not working very well. I really want to avoid another explosion of 'why didn't you open up the board'. If you guys between you have some names that you're comfortable inviting on though, then please feel free to send me those, we can do the rest later...
 
 
Olulabelle
13:24 / 07.04.05
Nearly done. We've had quite a lot. If there are the same amount next time we might need to enlist some more people to check through them. It depends how busy Haus is really. I finish work tomorrow until May, so I'm OK.
 
 
Olulabelle
21:46 / 10.04.05
Right. There were 48 applicants this time, and I have checked all their email addresses and blogs and links and sent them on to Haus. This time, however, I've also sent them on to Stoatie as well since I thought there were a lot for just Haus to go through and Stoatie offered at exactly the right moment. I have suggested they check half each to make the process quicker. When they get back to me I'll email Tom with the definitive list.

Some of the people who want to join sound really, really interesting. It makes me excited to think about having new members like that on the board, and whilst I know that the whole 'vetting new people' thing is not ideal, the majority of emails are from people who really want to join and have gone to the trouble of explaining precisely why.

And some of them are very, very funny.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:22 / 11.04.05
I'm a little disappointed that TeN's link doesn't go anywhere...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:41 / 11.04.05
I felt a similar disappointment.
 
 
Hieronymus
07:03 / 12.04.05
Anything any of us can do help, oullabelle?
 
 
Olulabelle
18:38 / 28.04.05
I've written a generic email to send to people who are applying for barbelith membership. It's so people know what's going on and why the process takes a while. It goes as follows:

Thank you for your interest in joining Barbelith.

We want to make sure you are a real person, so we check each application for acceptable email addresses and/or web presence. We do not accept submissions from internet mail addresses such as hotmail or yahoo (except under exceptional circumstances such as recommendation by a long standing board member) because we have had problems with members who joined using one of these in the past. If you have applied using one of these please re-apply using an ISP based, work or paid email address such as Blueyonder.

Contrary to rumour, we are not assessing the content of your email for writing quality or to see if you are interesting enough to join, we are only concerned with making sure you really exist and don’t want to join just to troll the site.

Once your email address or web presence has been confirmed by two Barbelith members, (each checking individually,) we will forward your email on to Tom in the next batch of applications. This happens around once a month, so please be prepared to wait a while before you are asked to join.

We are sorry for this complicated procedure and we wish we didn’t have to be so careful. Please bear with us, we do want new members on the site and we will do everything we can to help you get admitted.

Thanks in advance.

Barbelith Members.

Is this OK? If it is I will set up a rule so it gets automatically sent as soon as someone applies. I have a load of people I need to send it out to, so prompt replies/amends/whatevers would be ace.
 
 
Withiel: DALI'S ROTTWEILER
19:34 / 28.04.05
That's a really friendly and helpful form letter, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type. Especially the bit about the non-assessment of emails - I for one (applying for membership in the second wave) was convinced that my message would be subjected to intense scrutiny for anything indicating Barbe-worthiness.
In short, seems perfect to me.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:08 / 28.04.05
Yeah, that seems about spot on, olulabelle. Just the facts, but put pretty nicely. The explanation (why we need proper email addresses etc) is key, and you've got that down pretty damn good, imho.
 
 
Mazarine
20:33 / 28.04.05
Looks good to me.
 
 
Olulabelle
21:58 / 28.04.05
Excellent, thank you for your help everyone, it was quite hard to get right!
 
 
Tom Coates
06:53 / 29.04.05
Yup - I think that's great.
 
 
Olulabelle
12:07 / 29.04.05
Thank you Tom.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
12:41 / 30.04.05
Yes. As one of the email pesterers of Olulabelle, I can categorically state that that would have made me less likely to pester.

And less likely to be all nervous that I wasn't writin' good enough.
 
 
dj kali_ma
18:35 / 02.05.05
Yours is a Calvinist intellect, olulabelle.
 
 
alejandrodelloco
01:32 / 23.05.05
This thing still going? I sent a recommendation for a friend a while back...
 
 
Olulabelle
10:02 / 23.05.05
Yes. We are doing it once a month.

This month there were about 190 requests and they will be sent to Haus and then Tom some time this week.
 
 
Tom Coates
20:26 / 23.05.05
You can send them a little more often if you'd like. You don't have to wait a full month...
 
  

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