Upcoming changes in registration process

The old process is established, but I'm wondering what should be the criteria to review incoming requests. In my opinion, we should accept translators if we have an amount of positive information similar to what we used to have from FirstSteps (or higher), and not reject requests unless we have (strong) hints that an account is a vandal.

Most requests currently don't contain any information or translation, but that's not something to blame users for. It's possible that they registered now and will only add translations later (after filling the form they're immediately told "You're now a translator"), so empty/non-actionable requests should IMHO be left alone at least for some weeks or months.

As yet, I rejected requests that were older than 48 hours and no test translations were made.

Thanks for sharing, \m/etalhead. For your information, rejection implies delivering of this message (I've not checked the code but there isn't any other): MediaWiki:Tsb-email-rejected-body/en. The message:

• is very negative ("rejected [...] quality [...] did not meet the requirements [...] rejected"),
• implies that applying again may sometimes be impossible ("try to apply again"; might be a typo for "try and", though, and translators may have translated it in friendlier/different ways).

Now we also have some stats: http://laxstrom.name/blag/2014/03/03/numbers-on-translatewiki-net-sign-up-process/

The instructions to developers ("If you are a developer interested in documenting translations, or just exploring the platform, you are also welcome".)who want to add documentation is to join as an ordinary user, not a translator. But I thought that they needed translator rights to add documentation to qqq. So are they being given translator rights by some other review process?

And how about the translators who are trying to sign up to translate into a language which hasn't been enabled yet? If they can't use the sandbox they might give up if there isn't a link to the list of enabled languages and instructions on what to do if their language isn't on the list.

No, they can follow the same process. I think they can also add example "translations" to qqq if they don't know any other language? You're right about translators for new languages, this just happened with User:Paul Beppler (who was confused by not having the right to post new threads, because sandbox users are restricted) but Nike told him to translate in whatever language and I approved the account.

Personally I hope normal account registration won't be disabled, because the new process covers only a subset of all the possible cases; but anyway addition of new languages is basically frozen currently, we need a revamp and we should also update the docs on how to get appropriate permissions to write LQT threads.