I've been working on a feature that lets logged-in Antville users get a list of most-recently-updated-weblogs on the frontpage that only contains weblogs they are members of. (The second list, containting the most-recently-updated sites from the whole pool is still displayed underneath.)

Now the concept of membership is a bit blurry in Antville. Its original purpose is to mark users as contributors or admins for a web site. But for this purpose, it would be more logical that administrators initiate the sign up process for new members (contribs, admins etc.), for example by looking them up via username and email address (I think this is a feature we ought to implement, otherwise the process of appointing new contribs/admins is this very awkward ping-pong process which has to be started by the user, then finished by the admin).

Now the "my weblogs" list would give the user-initiated sign-up process a purpose (beyond just "maybe the admins will give you some rights", which would completely fall away as soon as we have admin-initiated roles), but there is a problem here. Which is that admins can disable user-sign-up. If we take basic membership as meaning "subscription to a weblog", this is awkward, because if a weblog is public I should also be able to sign up i.e. subscribe to it. So I'm proposing we remove the option to disable users sign up to a weblog.

Here's a table of what I think the membership levels should look like on Antville:

The other possibility would be to split the two functionalities (interest/subscription and functional roles on the site) into two, using different mechanisms to handle both. I don't like that idea so much because it makes things complicated, and I actually think that when you're an editor or admin for a site, you'll be also interested enough to subscribe to it ;-)