Browse & Post while Pending

Announced June 9, 2014

This is a new feature that we’re extremely excited about and one that will significantly help your group grow and thrive. 

Over the last few months, we’ve been spending a lot of time analyzing how new VarageSale users behave in their first 30 days on the platform. The data clearly confirmed one of our hunches: the faster a member gets approved, the more likely they are to come back and engage with the platform. We also found that some people do not come back to visit your community after they’ve been approved, even when they’re approved quickly. 

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Just put yourself in the shoes of a brand new user who isn’t even quite sure what VarageSale is. Let's call her Emma... Emma comes to this new website (or app) and goes through the trouble of creating an account. She's shown a list of communities near her and selects one. At this point, all she wants is to better understand what this VarageSale thing is all about and if it’s something she’d be interested in, however, she hits a wall. 

After asking to join a community, there’s simply nothing for her to do. She has to wait. For how long? Who knows... This is a very frustrating and disappointing experience for a new user. Emma still doesn’t know what VS is all about and why she should care. She leaves the site, forgets about it and never returns. 

Another very interesting data point we found was that once someone experiences VarageSale (i.e.: browses a community), their engagement level is exceptionally high. They stick around for a very long period of time, visit many times a day/week and consume or create a lot of content. 

We realize that our admins aren’t always able to accept new members as quickly as they’d want. At the same time, we want to engage these new members as quickly as possible to make sure they keep coming back for months or even years. 

We’re fixing all this. We will now be providing new members with a much improved experience from the very first visit. We want to show the Emmas of the world how wonderful your community is and why they should care, while being mindful of the privacy of your group. 

Pending members are also able to post items and comments. These items and comments, however, will remain invisible to other members until the person has been approved. As soon as that happens, their comments are added at the *end* of the comment thread and their items are bumped to the top of the feed. Pending members will be informed that their items/comments will only be published once they’ve been approved, in order to eliminate any confusion. Admins can see these items and comments before approving the member in question, if they wish to do so. 
This provides a great seamless experience to new users and allows them to fully utilize and understand what VarageSale is all about. 

As a recap, here’s what pending members CAN do: 
- Browse community in “anonymized” mode (other member's names are truncated to first name and last initial for privacy)
- Post items and discussions (only published after approval) 
- Post comments (only published after approval) 
- View other member’s profiles in “anonymized” mode 
- View their unpublished items in My Stuff 
- Search for items and discussions 
- Like things (likes will be visible to other members) 
- Follow other members (they won’t receive notifications until they’re approved, however) 
- Watch items (same as above, notifications will only start once they’re approved) 

Pending members CANNOT do the following: 
- Have items published to a community until they are approved 
- Have comments published to a community until they are approved 
- See full names other members 
- Message other members 
- View another member’s Facebook profile 
- Search for another member 
- Mention another member in a comment 
- See names of other members mentioned in comments (anonymized) 
- Receive community-related notifications 

Admins/Moderators can: 
- See a pending member’s items, discussions and comments on their profile 
- See a pending member’s comments on an item’s page 
- Comment on a pending member’s item. However, the pending member will not receive a notification until their membership is activated 

Denied/Banned members: 
- Can’t view the community, just like it was before 

It's widely known that optimizing the "time to ah-ah moment" is critical for the success of a platform like VarageSale. This is a significant step to expose new users to the platform more quickly and to get them engaged as soon as possible. We’re confident that it will have a very significant positive impact in your communities, which is why we’re so excited about this! 

This feature has been months in the making and I want to thank everybody on the team for doing such a terrific job with it!