If your Mahara site allows self registration, users are able to join up without you adding them manually.

Whilst this is a great time saver, it can also mean that you will find users adding themselves to your institution that you don't really want to be in there. This can be particularly problematic if spammers join your site.

Therefore, it makes sense for most administrators to deploy more control over the registration process by enabling the Confirm registration option in the institution settings. You can see how to allow this when you edit your institution settings later in this chapter.

As an institution administrator, this setting allows you to respond to these pending requests. You can decide if you would like that user to join.

Assuming you have the Confirm registration option set in your settings, start by clicking on Manage institutions. Then, click on Members. You will see a page showing you all the members who have requested to join.

For each member, you can decide whether to approve or deny them. Graham saw that somebody called Juliet has applied to join his Mechanical Engineering group. He knows Juliet and decided to allow her to join, so clicked on the Approve button:

On the following page, you are asked to confirm the action. Again, click on Approve to finish adding the user to the institution.