Auto-approval¶
The bot may be configured to auto-approve people who request to join ‘checked’ groups if they are already present in at least one other ‘checked’ group. This lets furries who already have their foot in the door with the local community to easily join other chatrooms in the local community, without waiting for each chatroom’s admins to process the join request. Users who aren’t auto-approved stay in the join request queue for manual review.
Add the bot as an admin in the groups you wish to enable auto-approval
functionality in, then use the /check_add command in the designated admin
group to add each group to the auto-approval system. The bot must have
permission to invite users.
The reason for why the bot auto-approved or didn’t auto-approve a join request will be logged to the configured admin chat and the console.
Checking versus trusting¶
Each enrolled chat has two trust-related flags:
Should I check new users here, reading the auto-approval pool?
Should I trust the users already here, adding to the auto-approval pool?
Checking and trusting are independent of each other. Variations of
/check_add let you control these flags:
/check_add, to check but not trust/check_add_trusted, to check and trust/check_trust, to not check but still trust/check_remove, to remove a chat from the system entirely
Note
All these commands require a user who may_check_chats. In the future,
/check_add might be opened up to all users. This would allow someone to
benefit from a pool of already-vetted local furries and use it for
auto-approving new join requests in their own chatroom(s), while preventing
a bad actor from trying to pollute the auto-approval pool with horrible
people before then sending join requests to enrolled chatrooms.
Tracking scammers¶
To highlight potential scammers trying to join groups, the bot checks join requests against the Furry Assisted Scam Tracking (FAST) project. It can be configured to check against any URL with a JSON list of user IDs as numbers or strings. The contents of the scam tracking list is cached in memory and refreshes at maximum once per day by default.
If a user is found on the scam tracking list, it will include a link to more information in the same admin chat message as the join request.
So far, FAST has not given us any false positives, but we chose to implement this logic in sewifurs.org instead of using Countersign Bot because:
Countersign Bot is more focused on catching scammers after they join a group, while we focus on the join request workflow.
There is always the risk of a false positive in the future.
We don’t want someone to get autokicked when no chat admins are online when they are encountering technical issues, like being unable to load a captcha.