Registration and approval

What happens after you sign up

You create an account, complete your profile, and add a site. Then a person reads what you wrote and decides.

Nothing about that last part is automated, and there is no way to pay to skip it. It is the reason the rest of the platform is worth anything.

The three states an account can be in

Waiting. You have signed up and your account is under review, or your profile is not finished yet. You can look around the directory and see who is here. You do not appear to anybody else, and you cannot send requests. A banner at the top of the screen tells you which of the two applies to you.

Approved. You can search, send requests, hold conversations, and agree collaborations. Your listed sites appear to other members.

Not approved. Access to the directory and to requests is closed. You will be told, and told why.

What the review is actually looking at

Whether you are a real professional doing real work, and whether the account reads like somebody who intends to collaborate rather than extract.

It is not looking at your site's metrics. Those were already measured against the same thresholds everybody else faces, and a person re-reading a number a machine already produced would add nothing.

So a strong profile with a site below the thresholds can be approved. That member takes part fully. Their own site simply is not listed.

What helps

Fill the profile in properly. A brand name that matches the site, a role that says what you actually do, a short bio in your own words.

Sparse profiles are the ones that sit longest, not because of a rule but because there is nothing in them to judge, and the reviewer has to guess.

How long it takes

We do not publish a promise we cannot keep. Reviews are done by a person and they are done in order. You get an email when the decision is made, either way.

If you are not approved

You will get the reason, and it is not a permanent verdict on you. If something was missing or unclear, that is fixable and worth fixing.

There is a way to ask for another look from inside your account once a decision has been made.

An approved membership can also be suspended later, for example when the network's rules are broken. While it is, your sites leave the directory and you cannot browse or send requests. You get an email when it happens, and the same way to ask for another look applies.