@mws I like your alternative to just have the list be another project with user rules. In fact, something like this was asked for here but it didn’t go anywhere.
In that thread, @pisum wrote:
i do think it would be useful to be able to set up groups of people so that you could filter that group (in project settings and also as a general filter), but i think that would complicate the way project trust works.
If I understand this correctly, “the way project trust works” is that [edit: my comments here support my following argument, but don’t really hit the mark with project trust … see my next comment about that] … the standard model is the open membership option, where the user has ultimate control over whether they are in or out of the project if it is created with “include only member observations”. And ours is the closed membership option, which maybe somewhat runs contrary to the trust model because admins can add user observations to the project independently of their wishes. Is that accurate?
The thing is, we (the iNaturalist Discord community) don’t really have or even want a closed membership. Anyone can join our community - we share the invite far and wide - and we don’t add anyone to our project “must be observed by” rules unless they request it. I would describe what we have implemented as a moderated membership. I would further argue that this is closer to the iNat ideal of openness than a fully closed membership because it operates on requests to join or leave initiated by the user, but it is much harder to maintain: it is completely disconnected from that “Join” button, relying instead on admins noticing that signaled intent to change their membership and taking action.
This feature request would reduce the admin burden of moderated membership by only requiring the admins to add users to the “approved” list once. Thereafter, users retain the ultimate control to join or leave any project that make use of that approved list. It’s a small reduction of workload that would be reduced even more if moderated membership were formally supported (e.g. via “Join”, followed by an admin pressing “Approve”) - but that’s a topic for a whole other feature request.