Invitations should be compatible with SSO

[mint_saxon]

@RyanK

We want to upload a list of email addresses that, if/when a user signs in for the first time they are auto-added to the group. We are using the domain solution for some groups, but that wouldn’t apply in this case.

It looks like this was discussed, but it’s unclear to me which solution was ultimately chosen. I tested with an email address that was registered in our main userbase, but hadn’t logged into our discourse site to initiate the SSO. When we logged in with that ID the account created but he’s not in the group.

This is the way I found to get SSO users pre-added to a group based on a list of e-mail addresses:

1. Send a private message, pasting the e-mail addresses into the recipients field (supported since August 2017) to create “staged” users. (Delete the private message within email_time_window_minutes if you don’t actually want to send anything to the users)
2. Add the staged users to the group, either:
   • One-by-one, on each user’s admin page
   • Use “Bulk Add To Group” on the group page, and paste in the same e-mail address list

This is really helpful for importing mailing lists onto a forum when SSO is enabled.

(Sorry for the thread necromancy – seems like the question is still open 2 years later, I couldn’t find this advice anywhere else)

It would still be nice if the normal invite users feature worked with SSO, so this could be done in one step (and so moderators could do it, currently it seems like only admins can do step 2).