Underscan Published on April 14, 08
by Underscan

Underscan's blog

Browse posts
Possible bug: different license for visitors and members for blog posts?
Posted on September 16, 08
6 comments (latest 2 weeks ago)
ExiftTool and "sensitive" meta data revisited
Posted on September 16, 08
A Sunday At Britzer Garden
Posted on April 22, 08
1 comment (latest 5 months ago)
Group Administration Function Needs An Overhaul - Urgently
6 comments (latest 5 months ago)
10000+ visits
Posted on April 12, 08
10 comments (latest 5 months ago)
Doc descriptions taken from Wikipedia
Posted on March 12, 08
10 comments (latest 5 months ago)
Thousands Of People Take Photos Every Day. What If One Of Them Seems Odd?
Posted on March 5, 08
21 comments (latest 6 months ago)
Ipernity Feature Ramblings - "view as slideshow" for other "image collections" than albums
Posted on February 28, 08
5 comments (latest 6 months ago)
Removing "sensitive" meta data using ExifTool
Posted on February 28, 08
3 comments (latest 7 months ago)

Keyword tags

ipernity
group

Member tags

Team ipernity
Roberto Ballerini - traveling
mad.melon

More information

This post is public
Attribution + non Commercial
  1. 324 visits / 1 vote

Group Administration Function Needs An Overhaul - Urgently

Monday April 14, 2008 at 11:20AM

Recently I was surprised to find a notification in my Ipernity Mailbox saying I had been granted administrative privileges for one of the groups I was a member of.
Weird. Even weirder it was a group I wasn't really that active in.

Still wondering about this I was surprised again by my mailbox. I found half a dozen messages informing me about new members to that specific group.
I deleted them for reasons of rather low level of importance to me only to find another few after doing so.

I decided to check what responsibilities arose from the administrator position.

I realised that I could turn off such notifications but generally I didn't feel like being an administrator for that specific group at all.
So I went looking for how to de-administrate myself.
First thing I found was that apart from me the group had like 30 more administrators. Surprising.
I assume most of them must have been as surprised as myself when they got to know about their new position.

The problem is: anyone with administrative privileges in a group seems to be able to promote any member to be an administrator as well - without the consent of that specific person.

The next problem is: you cannot renounce your status as administrator - at least as far as I found. Please correct me if I am wrong here.
The only way to get rid of that position I found was to quit the group (while keeping my documents in it) and then rejoin it as a regular member. The administrator status does not seem to remain through that process.

I therefore urgently ask the Ipernity Team to overhaul the Group Administration function to at least include the following:

  • need for a group member to ratify his promotion to an administrator
  • option to dismiss one's administrator status - for my sake only if there is another administrator available

Otherwise joining a group could easily lead to a responsibility you did not choose.

Considering the recent departure of members here at Ipernity and the mentioning of group administration as (at least) a collateral damage I think this may be considered urgent.

6 Comments / add your comment?

Ojisanjake pro says:
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink / translate )
wdj pro says:
Me too. They need to think through the implementation more carefully. At least send the proposed admin an email asking for confirmation first.
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
Virtual Lover 1™ pro says:
it's been my opinion that the original administrators of such groups want their groups to function this way.
i've had too many bad experiences with these type of free form groups elsewhere, including hijacking that leaves the originator of the group being locked out. additionally i don't want all the spam mail that accompanies such groups. i always quit groups which are designed this way.

furthermore- i still question groups importance without slideshow. it's too tedious and time consuming for me to look at every shot in a group one by one.

thanks for the chance to air my views on your page, U.S.

edit: tedious sounds personal regarding slideshows, no one's work is tedious- it's the process. i'd look at more individual shots if i could scan them in slideshow first and additionally i like to see people's work morph (or not ) together with such a function. peace.
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
Roberto Ballerini - traveling pro says:
I think these requests are in the wishlist for groups from Day 1 ;-)
The least Team Ipernity should urgently do is to turn off the default for notifications of new members

--
Seen in robertoballerini home page (?)
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
Underscan replies:
I think these requests are in the wishlist for groups from Day 1 ;-)

OK, I should check your statements more thoroughly - you seem to have every subject covered already. :)

The least Team Ipernity should urgently do is to turn off the default for notifications of new members

Well, actually to me that is "only" a minor nuisance. Considering mailing list administration, I think e. g. Majordomo has the "new member"-notification turned on by default also.
Anyway, this kind of notification IMO has only a very low information value and could - as you said - easily be turned off by default without any real loss.

Still it was this nuisance that got me going to check my new "administrator privileges" and thus let me find out that I had been promoted admin without my consent and that I could not (easily) rid myself of this position.

I consider a "mechanism of approval" for and/or a simple way to discard administrator status a more urgent issue as the current state seems to encourage behaviour such as described by mad.melon with people shifting the responsibility for their groups on to someone else, e. g. when quitting Ipernity.
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
Roberto Ballerini - traveling pro replies:
Before all the notification messages, you'll find a message telling you that you've been promoted... and who is the culprit :-))
And I subscribe all your ideas. I usually tolerate all the "features" that have a way off (like leaving the group and joining again), if the Team is working on features that haven't a way off (as the unusable latest docs features...)

--
Seen in my account recent activity (?)
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )

Add your comment

Reply to this comment

Edit your comment

Please sign in to post a comment Sign in now?


rss Latest comments – Subscribe to the feed of this post comments.