Anonymous members of open teams

[Guest]

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[waywardcats]

To those who are captains of open membership lending teams on Kiva, have you ever seen this before?

I received three almost identical emails:

Dear Kerry,
Anonymous has requested to join the following Lending Team: KivaFriends - Disabled
Persons.

Please follow this link to accept or reject this request:
<a href="https://www.kiva.org/community/teams/requests?_te=trq"
target="_blank">https://www.kiva.org/community/teams/requests?_te=trq</a&gt;

Best Wishes,
Kiva Staff

***

The link leads me to a page I have never seen before where I see the three requests with an "Accept" and "Reject" option for each.

Anonymous has requested to join KivaFriends.org    
Anonymous has requested to join KIVA Shopping Club    
Anonymous has requested to join KivaFriends - Disabled Persons       

There is, of course, no way to look at the profile of this Anonymous person.  Therefore, I have no access to any solid information upon which I should base my decision to accept or reject this request.      How have you decided what to do?

-Kerry-

ETA: The "Accept" and "Reject" buttons also appear in my "Some News for You" feed.

[waywardcats]

I also received the same message this morning...
Please follow this link to accept or reject this request:
https://www.kiva.org/community/teams/requests?_te=trq
very strange and I did not reply, I just deleted it.
we have only 7 people on our team so I wondered how 'anonymous' found us 
-jan-

edit: this team is closed

Since there are multiple reports of this Anonymous person trying to join many different teams, I have made the decision to reject their request for the two teams I am still able to do so. 

For the record, the option to accept or reject the request appears to disappear as soon as one team captain takes action.  One of the KivaFriends team captains apparently accepted the request at which point the buttons disappeared and this message was left on my newsfeed:

The request by anonymous to join the KivaFriends.org team has been accepted.

For some reason an exclamation point is added once a request is rejected.

anonymous has requested to join the KivaFriends - Disabled Persons team. Rejected!

My apologies to anonymous if their intentions are good, however I am uncomfortable with the many simultaneous requests to anonymously join so many teams.  YMMV.

-Kerry-

[David2051]

I got a couple of these requests too and I haven't clicked either button.  I did send a message to Paul about it and there has also been discussion about it on the Kiva Suggestions team.  Hopefully the problem will be corrected before too long.  In the mean time I was planning to just ignore them.

[waywardcats]

I got a couple of these requests too and I haven't clicked either button.  I did send a message to Paul about it and there has also been discussion about it on the Kiva Suggestions team.  Hopefully the problem will be corrected before too long.  In the mean time I was planning to just ignore them.

Thanks David,

For those of us who are not members of the Kiva Suggestions team, would you mind characterizing the "problem"?  On the surface this seems to be a design feature.

Thanks,

-Kerry-

Edit: typo.

[David2051]

I think it's just that Ramona and Skimmis and I have reported the problem.  No word back from Kiva staff yet.  I don't see how it could be a feature to send join request messages for open teams.  It also seems suspicious to me that all of these requests have been from "anonymous".  I will keep a lookout for join messages or requests from non anonymous people.  It usually doesn't take long to find someone joining the India team.  Hope to learn more soon.

[TheTatiana]

I got it on both teams I'm captain of as well.  I smelled spam so I hit 'reject'.

[David2051]

Paul reported that he got one and they are looking into it. 

[YowieFreak]

Completely unrelated, but there is of course "anonymous" and "Anonymous".

I hadn't even realised that someone actually had that as their userid until today.

[Skimmis]

If you examine Anonymous in a team you are a captain of,
example http://www.kiva.org/team/norway/members/edit
it isnt even possible to check if they have given any loans at all or as a member of your team.

[waywardcats]

I don't see how it could be a feature to send join request messages for open teams.  It also seems suspicious to me that all of these requests have been from "anonymous".  I will keep a lookout for join messages or requests from non anonymous people.  It usually doesn't take long to find someone joining the India team.  Hope to learn more soon.

I guess since I am unfamiliar with this procedure - not being a captain of any closed teams - that I thought it was new.  But, if I understand you correctly, this is how things are set up to work for closed teams and it has just suddenly been applied to open teams at least in the case of one anonymous member. 

I agree that open teams should not see these requests, although I could make an argument that one might want the option to screen profiles of new anonymous members.  But, since Kiva has set it up so that anonymous profiles are truly completely anonymous and even the account lending activity is hidden from everyone, there is no way to perform such a screening.  Therefore, I agree that this instance is probably a bug of some sort. 

What occurred to me to wonder was if this was someone who was already a member of these team who had changed to an anonymous profile and the system didn't know what to do with the team information.  Because, are anonymous lenders able to participate in teams?  I know they are not allowed to send lender private messages, so I guess I assumed that they were not able to post team messages either, and perhaps were not allowed to join teams.  Does anyone know for sure?   

-Kerry-