The discussion revolves around using Discourse as a mailing list replacement. xav explains their setup, where mailing list members are grouped into categories with automatic notification settings, but faces challenges with user registration and group access. They seek a way to streamline joining a group during registration. itsbhanusharma suggests using staged users with email domain-based group assignment or sending invites with pre-assigned group membership. MikeNolan shares his approach of creating users from historical email data, assigning random passwords, and notifying subscribers to reset their passwords, while also inviting non-posting subscribers via invitations.
We are trying to move from a mailing list based organisation, the first step (done) was to mirror the mailing list to build an archive, and now we want to leave it hybrid for a while, with some users mostly using discourse as a mailing list + online archive, the others using discourse online.
Discourse works quite ok as a mailing list replacement: each list is a category restricted to a group, and to be a member of the list you are a member of the group.
We then can set up the notification level of that group so by default, it watches the category.
What I didn’t solve yet is the registration, the new user needs first to create an account, then request membership to the group (the best we found is to direct them to the welcome topic in the category and hit the “request access” button), then wait until someone approve the request and go to the category (or wait until a new post ends up in her inbox)
It would smooth things if we could merge the registration (as a user)+ request to join a group
Searching this forum, I haven’t found a way to do that. Am I missing something? Do you have suggestions to make it easier for the users to join a group as part of the registration process?
This should be achievable if you created staged users while importing your mailing list to discourse.
if these users come from a specific email domain (@example.com) then the groups can be set so that the members are automatically assigned the given group(s) based on their email address.
Another way is to send them invites with group membership assigned upon accepting the invite.
What I’m doing with my mailing lists is I started out by creating users for all the unique email addresses everyone has posted from over the last 20 years. Yeah, this probably created a few near-duplicate users, including me, and I know a few users who posted under multiple dissimilar email addresses over the years, as they moved around.
When I start the transition, probably next week, I will notify my subscribers that if they have posted they may already have an account under their email address, and they should try to generate a new password for it. (I assigned random 15 character passwords as I created the users.) If that doesn’t work, they have two options: Sign up for a new user account or contact me to see what email address they had posted under, in case it is an email address they can still access. (The fact that user@foo.com is, and should be, considered separate from user@bar.foo.com entered into my planning.)
I also have people who have been read-only subscribers, so they don’t have an account yet, as they’ve never posted. I may send out invitations to them to join. (I’ve already tested what happens if I try to invite someone who already has a user account under that email address, those just get bypassed.)