Moderated community membership request should have watch option

[azurelunatic]

Title
Moderated community membership request should have watch option

Short, concise description of the idea
When requesting membership to a community that does not have open membership, watching the community should be presented as an option to parallel the open community join process.

Full description of the ideaRevisiting this historical

Comments

[charliemc]

+1

[lassarina]

+1!

This is a behaviour that has annoyed me for quite some time.

A workaround for the issues is that the page could display a line of text informing the user that entries may not be visible if they are restricted to community members only?

[azurelunatic]

And that made me think of another potential drawback, albeit a small one: some people with communities that do not have open membership get unnecessarily upset when non-members watch the community, even though mere watching grants the watcher only the ability to see any public entries on their friends list and subscribe to userpic updates and the like.

[pauamma]

That and or defer actual watching until membership is approved, if the community has a default security of members-only.

[sleepfighter]

Yes pleeeaaase. Current behavior is kind of like the cart followed by the horse.

[worldserpent]

Sounds good. More consistency makes the site easier to use.

[nighthawkal]

I think I am against that because it can lead to harassment of members in that community. Sometimes communities are closed because they want to keep the membership small or to just a certain group of people.

[azurelunatic]

How would this allow anything that was not already possible?

[nighthawkal]

Sometimes people take discussion on other communities and post it on other communities, which leads to people looking up other people, their profiles, and information and harassing them. I've known a few people who have had issues with people harassing them over things they've said in communities because trolls got in. I don't think we should make a troll's job easier. If a community wants to be closed, let it be closed. Make it so that someone has to join the community and become a member to see any of the posts.

[girlfight]

If the entries are posted Members-Only, watching the community doesn't mean you can see them. Watching a community means basically nothing, if the posts are Members-Only, until you're a member. This suggestion wouldn't change anything in terms of privacy or ease of accessing posts.