From the Xfce mailing list:
"Dear Xfce users and contributors,
I would like to bring to your attention a change regarding registration on our GitLab instance.
Due to increased spam activity and Google making reCAPTCHA more difficult to use, we, the core developers, have decided to suspend new registrations until further notice.
New users can still create accounts via SSO, meaning a GitLab.com or GitHub account will be required for new contributors.
As a tentative measure, newly created users will no longer need to request fork permissions, we hope this helps lower the entry barrier.
This change is planned to take effect on 2025-02-15 (Saturday).
For more details, please refer to: https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/gitlab_signup.
Cheers,
Andre Miranda"
I'm not sure that I understand your comment.
Permissions and access still needs to be managed and abuse mitigated.
gitlab.xfce.org is a self-hosted instance of GitLab and we have to take preventative measures to deal with the creation of spam accounts. Contributors can either do that with SSO from an account they have at either gitlab.com or github.com. This does not require Xfce dev intervention.
If one does not want to use SSO, they can contact us on Matrix and an account will be created manually.
P.S. Xfce does not have any employees. We are all volunteers.