Starting Monday, May 17th at 17:00 Pacific Time (UTC-7), unaccepted invites will now expire after 8 calendar days.
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At Bugcrowd, we place researchers first. When you receive an invitation, you’ve been able to sit idle on it and accept it at any point while the program is still active. Unfortunately, we only send out a limited # of invites and less than 70% of the invites are accepted by our invited researchers. This implies that over 30% of our invites could potentially be sent to other researchers who may be interested in hacking and not simply idling on an invite.
Un-actioned invites are like seat reservations at a movie theatre that go unused. Very often, programs have a limited number of seats, and not knowing who will show up to the movie makes it difficult to send out more invitations. If we oversell the movie theatre, we might not have enough seats left when someone accepts their invite!
Expiring Invites Enter the Arena
Just imagine, if we knew someone wasn’t interested in coming to a particular movie, or they hadn’t arrived before the trailers finished, we could give their invitation to someone who wanted it! That’s why we are updating our invite acceptance process to include Expiring Invites.
Following this change to invites, please accept or decline your invite within an 8-day period. Otherwise, the invite automatically expires. If the program hasn’t started yet, that’s 8 days from program launch. If the program has started, that’s 8 days from when you received your invitation. If the program is paused or rescheduled, the counter will be paused until the program launches or resumes.
Why make this Expiring Invites change?
We want to allow as many researchers possible to work on private programs. By declining invites or letting them expire, we can immediately send them to other researchers, giving your fellow researchers more opportunities to participate in private programs. While some researchers may be losing the optionality that long-lived invitations used to represent, we believe that invitations should not be hoarded, and that having more invitations cycle through the crowd represents a more fair distribution for the whole community.
What happens to existing invites?
If you currently have program invitations that haven’t been accepted or rejected yet, you’ve still got time! We haven’t applied the timeout to already-existing invitations at time of this blog, but we will in the next week or so. Please review your invitations, accept any that you have interest in working on and decline others that you are not interested!
Recap
- Private program Invitations to already active programs will expire 8 days after they are issued
- Invitations to upcoming programs will expire 8 days after the program starts
- If a program is paused or rescheduled, the timer on your invitation will also pause until it starts again
- You can find your invitations and how long they have left in your Dashboard
- Existing program invitations will not immediately start to expire, but they will have the new timeout applied during the next week. Accept any you want to keep. Decline the ones you do not want.
