Unable to add invited emails to trust level groups

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In this discussion, tobiaseigen reports an issue where invited users—particularly those admins trust—are not automatically assigned to higher trust levels (e.g., TL2) upon joining, despite being added to groups. This causes confusion and errors for users interacting via email, as they’re treated like new users (TL0) and restricted from posting or uploading images. codinghorror clarifies that invited users should default to TL1, not TL0, and suggests this may be a bug if not working as intended. tobiaseigen confirms the issue occurred in their case, noting the user experienced errors despite being part of an invited group, and suspects the user may have registered independently before the invitation. They also mention difficulty tracing the exact steps of the user’s join process and recall possibly manually adding the trust level later. codinghorror asks for a step-by-step description to help diagnose, while tobiaseigen admits they can’t easily reconstruct the exact process, revealing the user was already registered before the group invitation and is now at TL1. They suggest adding a simple audit trail or profile log to help admins track such cases in the future. The core issue remains: admins cannot assign trust levels during invitation, leading to inconsistent user experiences and confusion.

1

On the admin interface, admins are able to manually add users they know they trust to e.g. trust_level_2.

When inviting new users, admins are able to select groups but not trust levels. This is a problem since those trusted people who are being invited are now being treated as new users who are prevented from doing various things, which is especially confusing when they interact via email and get errors like this:

Reason:

Sorry, new users can only mention 2 users in a post.
Sorry, new users can't put images in posts.
Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post.

If you can correct the problem, please try again.

I see there is discussion elsewhere about this issue of trust levels and invitations, but my case is more specific - methinks admins should be able to specify the trust level directly.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/invited-a-friend-and-now-they-are-trust-level-2/14802

2

Invited users should come in at TL1, not new user. See default invitee trust level site setting.

So this feature doesn’t need to exist, it already exists..

3

Sure, except that it didn’t actually work as designed in my case.. my user got loads of errors when trying to participate in the forum by email right after joining. Luckily she perservered and complained to me.

It is confusing to have groups that I can add via one interface but not via another. I guess I have to separate in my mind the system groups from the admin-created groups even though they are managed together in the same place as though they are the same thing.

4

Dunno, then there’s some kind of bug. Can you describe the exact process, step by step, of how this user joined? If they accepted an invite from you, they should come in as TL1 per the site setting I described.

5

I just did a bit of troubleshooting and am realizing that I am not able to easily describe the exact process, step by step, of how this particular user joined. Looks like I did not invite her, though. She was part of the group I invited on Friday but it looks like she was already registered on the site on Wednesday. She’s now in TL1 and the private group but I don’t remember whether I added the trust level manually. I was doing alot of user management stuff on Friday and over the weekend including with her account.

One thing this is highlighting for me is that some sort of audit trail would be helpful - even a simple log - that is accessible via the user profile page for admins.