#1 - April 30, 2013, 5:41 p.m.
Clicking “Join Random” should have 0% probability of landing you as a spectator, and yet this just happened to me.
"Join Random" != spectating
#3 - April 30, 2013, 5:51 p.m.
Join Random will put you on either the Red team or the Blue team, not spectator. However, there’s an issue where the join team buttons aren’t greying out properly when the teams are full. So I suspect that’s what happened to you. You began the match as a spectator, clicked Join Random, but both teams were full, so the UI just closed, without moving you off the spectator team.