The access issue is solved for bug reports now due to the Big Bug Reporting Update.
Everybody here in the current topic that made a post or Liked one of the posts (as of Mar 19) has had their join request accepted if they submitted one.
For everybody else that participates here later than this reply, please follow the instructions in the linked announcement above on how to get your join request in. We are slowly accepting people from the backlog to make sure we don’t overwhelm internal teams, but it is our goal to clear out the backlog. It will take us some time before we’re caught up with requests so appreciate your patience here.
This resolves the issue for all bug reporting categories.
For the feature request side of the matter, I am consolidating the threads into one thread, namely this one: All forum users should have a path forward to be able to post in feature requests - #154 by Hooksmith.
Please check out the update I posted there for further information. I will close this thread so that all further discussion is centralized in the thread above.