E-lists at Cornell

Approving Requests to Join (Lyris)

One of the ways you can configure your Lyris-based list determines who is allowed to join. There are three options:

• open - anyone can join (no approval needed)
  use this setting if you don't need or want to restrict who can join
  (for example, a list about road closings at Cornell, or a general discussion of woodpeckers)
• private - administrator must approve new members
  use this setting if you want to review requests to join
  (for example, a list for administrative aides, or grad students, or volunteers at commencement)
• closed - only an administrator can add new members
  use this to restrict membership to only those people added by a list administrator
  (for example, a list for staff in a particular department, or students taking a particular class)

  (See our List Configuration page for details on this and other options.)

If you chose private, people who want to join your list can still send the "join" command (see our Joining a List page for details), but they won't start receiving postings from the list until you approve their request to join. (You can also decide to reject their request. We'll cover that, too.)

This is a rare instance where using e-mail commands sent to Lyris actually works better than using the administrative web interface.

When someone tries to join a private list, the list administrators will receive a notification e-mail like this one.   As shown, to accept or reject the request, you send a two-line message addressed to lyris@list.cornell.edu. Leave the subject line blank.   Please note that the message you send must come from the e-mail address you use as a Lyris list administrator.

The first line lets Lyris know who you are. Include your list password after the word "login" and a space. Do not include the parentheses shown in the message you get from Lyris. (What if I've forgotten my Lyris password?)   The second line tells Lyris whether you want to accept or reject the request. The number on the second line will be different every time you get one of these messages, so either cut and paste, or type the number carefully.

Some of you are probably asking yourselves, "If I don't want to approve a request, why don't I just ignore it?" Well, you can, but the name of the person will clutter up your membership list with a status of "private" so it's much neater to do things as described here.