Anonymous members of open teams

[Guest]

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[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!