Stitch places an enormous emphasis on keeping all our members safe, while also creating a community where new members feel welcome from the moment they join.
All members need to be verified before they can initiate a conversation with another member through Stitch. Until recently, however, we did allow Full members to send a message to unverified members, as a way to reach out to new members to welcome them and encourage them to attend an in-person activity to get verified.
The system would provide warnings to restrict their conversation only to helping the new member get verified, and not share any personal contact information, but otherwise members were free to communicate as they wished.
Unfortunately, we found that a small number of members disregarded these warnings, which compromised the safety of the entire community. We have therefore introduced new restrictions that limit messages to unverified members, while still supporting the goal of welcoming new members to the community.
You can learn about these changes in the video below, or else read on for more details.
Restrictions on who you can message
Messages to unverified members are now only permitted for the purpose of inviting an unverified member to an in-person activity, so they can be welcomed to the community and encouraged to get verified.
To be able to send an activity invite to an unverified member:
They must be within 50km of yourself
You must be registered to at least one upcoming in-person activity
You don’t need to be the organiser — any attendee can send these invites!
To send an activity invite to an unverified member on the Members page, simply click the “Message” button as you usually do. Instead of the usual message box, you will see this message:
Select the Invite button, and then Stitch will show you the following message box:
This message box lets you choose which in-person activity you would like to invite them to, and compose a personal message to encourage them to come along.
Please note: once you invite them to an activity, they will be able to open the activity details and see its location and date, but they won't be able to click Attend or post comments on the event. They will be attending as your guest, so please make an effort to look out for them and help them find you.
What the unverified member sees
When receiving an invite, the unverified member will see a message that looks like this:
This lets them see your message and reply to you, as well as open the details of the event so they can find out the date, time, and location.
As noted above, they won't be able to officially register for the activity, so you’ll need to communicate with them to bring them along. If you are not the organizer of the event, we recommend you reach out to the organizer to let them know that an extra person will be coming along.
The best types of events to invite unverified members to are those that don't include a strict limit on attendee numbers.
Thank you for your understanding as we continue to roll out changes like these to improve the safety of the Stitch Community.