Signup Policy

[ratified 2016-09-03]

So WeAllJS does have a specific process when people sign up through wealljs.org – invites are not automatically accepted. There’s good reasons for this! While we strive to make sure everyone feels welcome, we also have a responsibility to take some reasonable measures to support our community’s health and well-being, as people.

What happens when I sign up?

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When a new user signs up through wealljs.org, Wheelie, our slack bot, posts a message with the form info to the admin-signups channel. Basically, this is what we see:

For the overwhelming majority of signups, we push that Invite button, and a new user gets an email from Slack soon afterwards so they can join! It’s very rare to actually press that No button, but when we do, it’s for specific reasons surrounding the well-being of the community.

The usernames in the signup form will be used exclusively to check against these lists, and to get excited when cool people we know sign up! Admins will not visit/look through the Twitter or GitHub accounts given as part of the signup process. We will also not contact anyone externally about the signup. It will only be reviewed privately by active admins.

Additionally, the only email you will receive from WeAllJS is the Slack invite. We do not retain a list of email addresses besides whatever data retention Slack itself does in its (limited) chat logs and user profiles after they’ve signed up.

That said, there are basically three reasons why we might press that “no” button: the first is for duplicated, invalid (bad email), or spammy invites. The second is if they’re a community member that is listed in the “yellow flag” list because they’re either temporarily banned or have received concrete warnings yet are signing up for a new account. The third is if they’re listed in House Verbot – a list of people that are not welcome in the space under any circumstances and for good reason. Both lists are fully confidential and only include names and basic details of why the listed names got included.

The Yellow Flag List

Our enforcement policy specifies temporary ban periods, and eventual permanent bans for repeated or egregious violations of the Code of Conduct.

The list contains entries for WeAllJS community members who have received concrete warnings or have gotten temporarily banned. Admins might consult this list if we suspect someone who was temporarily banned might be trying to sign up again, if we need to escalate enforcement as per the policy, or whether someone’s ban is done and their accounts can be restored. Otherwise it’s just brief notes in case a different admin has to be the one to address an issue with a listed person.

House Verbot

The second list is simple: it is composed of known harassers, rapists, white supremacists, and open, vocal apologists for these and similar things. Think @nero or literally Hitler. Or people that have essentially developed similar reputations in local communities, some of which we might find out about through whisper networks. While they might be willing to come into this space, follow the Code of Conduct, and otherwise behave, these are people that we are wary enough that we do not feel remotely safe having in our space at all. This is a very very short list, but it’s good to keep around since not all admins have these names in their heads.

This list also includes people who have been explicitly banned from the Slack, in case they try to rejoin with a different email at a later date, for some reason.

House Verbot does not include anyone who has simply expressed some ideological differences to WeAllJS’s approach to things but who would be willing to follow the rules here and who we do not believe would use their presence here for malicious purposes (collecting internal data, directing harassment mobs, etc). Those folks are welcome. And you’re free to disagree with our written-down Code of Conduct and associated policies.

So, to repeat, some examples of things that get people into House Verbot:

• Being known reported harassers
• Being known reported rapists
• Prominent advocacy of sexism/racism/etc (think White Nationalists, PUAs, and Breitbart writers)
• Getting permanently banned from the WeAllJS slack for either flagrant or repeated Code of Conduct violations

Things that don’t get you blacklisted:

• General sentiment, but not prominent advocacy of reverse-ism stuff (not-all-men, all-lives-matter, etc)
• Thinking that Codes of Conduct are bullshit (as long as you’re willing to play along when participating in our space – that is a hard requirement)
• Being Cis, Straight, White, Male, and being called Kevin
• Thinking “cis” is a slur

A Certain person Joined, and I’m really concerned

If you see someone enter the Slack who you think definitely belongs in House Verbot, please /admin about it, and the admin team will have a conversation with you, ask questions, and collect some information on the matter. Once that’s done and the admins have discussed it, they will notify you of the decision. If the person ends up in House Verbot, they will be immediately banned.

Remember that immediate inclusion in House Verbot requires a significant degree of danger or reasonable suspicion that the person might be greatly harmful to the community. The admin team will not include people in House Verbot over general ideological, political, religious, or such differences: in those cases, we trust that the Code of Conduct and enforcement policies, together, will protect against the harm those differences might cause.

How do I know if you said “no”?

That’s a good question – the No button on our signup message does not notify applicants about the rejection: it will simply drop and ignore the request. If you have not received an invite email, though, it’s much more likely that there has been some delivery issue and you are free to try signing up again the next day.

If you continue to not receive the invites on signup, please contact us through any of the methods listed in the Enforcement section of the Code of Conduct, and we’ll get back to you about it and resolve the matter.