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-

[David2051]

I am not a captain of any closed teams either, though I am a member of one (team captains).  There must be some mechanism for allowing people to join closed teams though, and I think this is it.

It is possible for anonymous lenders to join team as Smile Train has 6 or 7 anonymous members. 

Usually I always have a Team India join message in my recent news items, but as it turns out there aren't any currently.  All my news items now are team messages.  Hopefully this was just a one time event. 

Keeping my fingers crossed...   

[Natasha]

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-

Hi Kerry,

I currently administer an "anonymous" account and was able to join open teams and attribute loans to those teams. I have not tried to post a team message under that account, so not sure on that front.

If you examine Anonymous in a team you are a captain of,
example http://www.kiva.org/team/norway/members/edit
it isn't even possible to check if they have given any loans at all or as a member of your team.

I can't speak to the Anonymous Lenders who recently asked to join other teams, but I don't think that all lenders that wish to have their profiles hidden have nefarious reasons for joining teams, perhaps they still wish to participate in a more limited way, than others. And personally, I think that unless they prove otherwise in terms of stepping out of line (such as spamming members), there should be no reason why they are not approved for an open team (different for closed teams, where membership is monitored). Nor do I think that the Team Captain(s) should have access to their details, since they have made a conscious decision not to share their details with others. Of course it is up to each Team's Captain(s) to decide how they administer their teams, but there are plenty of Kiva Lenders who join teams with open profiles, who have not yet made a loan attributed to that team, so (IMHO) I don't think that is a necessarily a good basis for criteria of who should be allowed to be on an open team.

-Natasha-  

Edit: Grammar

[Mona]

If I understood Paul's answer on the Kiva Suggestions team right, he thinks that these requests come through an automated script like someone trying to hack the system. I will therefore reject all requests of this kind.

[carien]

I was one of the st.. ones who accepted I now removed the member from the team.


 

[carien]

I don't know what it means but something just pupped up from the blue there is a attempt to take over your default search I could choose from two options I forget what it said but when I didn't do nothing it disappeared

I hope it hasn;t have anything to do with me removing the member

[waywardcats]

The answer to this issue has been posted on the Kiva Team Captains team in the Technical Issues thread.  Thanks to the various lenders who have communicated directly with Kiva and with each other to spread the news!

A member of the Kiva Team Captains team posted yesterday this response from Ali, to the question of the recent Anonymous member attempting to join even open teams which do not require accept/reject decisions from team captains:

"Thanks so much for your email, and thanks for reporting this issue.

We learned that someone was spamming lending team captains by exploiting a hole in Kiva's coding system and automatically requesting to join lending teams. We have resolved this issue by patching this hole in our system so that this won't happen again, and you can ignore the Anonymous request to join your lending team that you received.

If you have any questions about this, please let me know, and I will be glad to answer them for you.

Best wishes,
Ali Price
Customer Service Manager"

So, if you are a team captain and have been getting requests from Anonymous to join your team, you're probably safest for now to reject them.  (If you're captain of an open team, you definitely SHOULD reject them, since normal new members just *join*, they don't need to be approved, so that would prove this is the spammer exploiting the coding hole.)

I hope that helps.

--Diane.

[Amy-in-PHX]

The answer to this issue has been posted on the Kiva Team Captains team in the Technical Issues thread.  Thanks to the various lenders who have communicated directly with Kiva and with each other to spread the news!
So, if you are a team captain and have been getting requests from Anonymous to join your team, you're probably safest for now to reject them.  (If you're captain of an open team, you definitely SHOULD reject them, since normal new members just *join*, they don't need to be approved, so that would prove this is the spammer exploiting the coding hole.)

I hope that helps.

--Diane.

Just a word to the wise - seeing this discussion on KF got me wondering whether someone is just trying to annoy people, or whether they might be able to use teams somehow to identify lenders with bigger-than-average Kiva accounts.  I checked my Kiva password, and changed it to a more secure one, using the maximum number of characters Kiva's system allows.  The amount of money flowing through Kiva every week has probably attracted attention from some people who would rather take than give.

[Natasha]

Thanks Kerry and Diane for the update and clarification on the bug. Great that its fixed!