Group Registration Closure

Our group registration system has been around for some time, in various guises.  Over that time, our small but dedicated team of staff has attempted to keep up with demand for groups.  Unfortunately, in the early years of GRF, this generated a substantial backlog of processing, since the system was very manual, a lot of data was processed (restricting the staff who had access) and each group can take some time to properly investigate.  To address this issue, we've tried a number of alternatives, such as priority group emails, and, lately, a streamlined group registration system known as "grf-f".

For various reasons, these replacements haven't worked quite how we'd want or need them to in order to achieve our objective of registering groups in a timely fashion.  Meanwhile, development of GMS, our automated replacement GRF system, continues.

For these reasons, we have taken the decision to temporarily close the group registration system.

What this means is that -

• No new group registrations will be accepted from this point onwards, until further notice.

• Outstanding grf-f applications already in the queue will be processed in due course.

• Outstanding "old style" GRF applications will not be processed (most of the applications in this set are very old now, and the people who submitted them should have seen at least one reminder to refile under grf-f)

• All existing registered groups are unaffected and continue as normal.

Please bear with us whilst we work on where we want to go next with this system.  Meanwhile, if there are channels currently owned by freenode-staff that your project could make use of, please contact a staffer to see if (provisional) op rights can be granted to your account. (These would likely be done on a somewhat temporary basis, until such time as registration re-opens.)  Note also that this is only to gain ops on channels, not for obtaining group cloaks.

As always, thanks for flying freenode!

mrmist.