Community Page: How to Auto-Approve User access request?

Question

Plan for communities in SharePoint Server 2013 shows the different kind of permission types a community has.

I'm interested in the "Open community with explicit membership. Everyone can view the site and can automatically join to contribute to the site.".

• The permissions are supposed to be: "Share the site with Everyone and grant Visitor permissions so they can view the site and automatically join as members."
• Also "Enable auto-approval on the site."

So this is what I got from this explanation:

• Put Everyone in the Visitors group (e.g. "Visitors of MyCommunity"). This mean they have read-permission.
• Set the Members group to auto-accept new members

Now when clicking the button "Join this community" on the community home page as a user who isn't yet a member, I would want for him to automatically join the members group. However this doesn't work: The button results in an access request for the site. In that access request I have to manually assign the group ("Members of MyCommunity") to the user.

I have tried the following:

• Disallow Requests for Visitors group
• Allow Requests for Members group
• Set Members group as "Default" group
• Checked the "Join this community" Webpart properties whether I can set a default group to join

The only way I found for the "Join this community" button to work like I want it to work (user clicks it, is automatically joined) is to have Everyone in the Members group from the beginning. That means everyone can edit stuff in the community without even joining it. Not the desired result.

How to set up a community so that users have to actively click the "Join this community" button to be able to participate in the community? No "Approver" of this join should be necessary, it should be automatic.

Answer 1

Have you checked the "Enable Auto-Approval" checkbox in the "Community Settings"?

However, this option is only available if you create the Community Site as a Site Collection:

http://www.jasperoosterveld.com/2013/02/sharepoint-2013-community-site-auto.html