[jancsika]

> We do have Recaptcha support which can be configured - are you seeing these kinds of issues with that enabled/configured?

Thanks, I have used Recaptcha for a long time now. It made no difference.

> One item that is on the roadmap that is coming and may be of interest is `Optional Admin Approval for local user sign up` - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4491.

Yes, that would be a very sensible solution and welcome feature for my use case here.

Unfortunately, from the bottom of that issue tracker:

"Yikes. I'm glad we did the further breakdown and pre-work. It's a bit cringeworthy looking back and seeing I estimated a 5"

[mushakov]

Hi! I'm a PM at GitLab. Please see my reply above for more details but TL;DR we shipped the first iteration of the `Optional Admin Approval for local user sign up` feature in 13.5. I'd love your feedback! Please comment on the epic if there are other changes for this feature that would help your use case https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4491

[jancsika]

Thanks for the update. I can certainly manage user sign-up from the admin tab for the time being. Once it's hooked into email, I believe that will make things maintainable again for me.

From a UX standpoint it's still sub-par. Someone who wants to report an issue doesn't want to wait an arbitrary amount of time to be allowed to report an issue. They are ready to report it at that moment.

And as an admin, I don't want to have to approve new users on a schedule to ensure the delay is low enough that they are still willing to submit the issue after I approve them. I'd much prefer they go ahead and submit the content, especially so that I can use it in my review of whether to approve the sign up or not.

I seem to remember some pattern in Gitlab where my login period timed out before I finished making a comment. When I logged back in, Gitlab had somehow saved my comment content so that I could then post it so that others could see it. Is there any way to use that pattern for users who haven't been approved yet? So that they can post content, but with a warning shown to them that other users won't see it until the sign-up is approved.

[mushakov]

That's a really interesting idea! Users could have limited interactions with the instance and content queued up until approved by an administrator. I created an issue to capture this. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273542