New 'accept invitation' prompt feature causing issues with invitation links

[gassim (Al-Gassim Sharaf Addin)]

Thank you for your interest!

@sam

What is the value in not using security here? Is latest just a giant amount of noise for the typical user? We also have a “by default all categories are suppressed from latest” setting that may be interesting

The rooms that are kept private are for the course participants. Basically we want these rooms to be a dedicated space without affecting the rest of the forum activity (latest, top…etc) Having the course discussion forums in private categories is not because they are ‘secret’ but because only those who choose to enroll in the course need to see the topics and discussion while those who don’t can continue to use the rest of the site as usual.

@sam

Can sidebar alleviate the pain a bit? If you have the category in your sidebar at least it calls it out. Maybe invite should also allow adding to sidebar? I am not sure?

Thanks for the suggestion! I have not experimented on the sidebar yet but here’s a free writing about why I have not promoted the side bar yet:

1. The homepage already displays two columns: Categories in one column, and latest in the other; having the sidebar seems like a repetition in the homepage (there isn’t a way to keep it off in the homepage?)
2. The sidebar seems to give more than necessary attention to Private Messages and we don’t encourage the use PM much.
3. Contrary to the thought that this will ease the pain, the sidebar will seem like a distraction for course participants who join the private category because we don’t want the other categories to appear during their participation. (there isn’t an option to disable the sidebar in some categories?)
4. If there is an option for Admin to customize the sidebar per ‘group’ so the participants in group A get to see things relevant to group A while group B will things relevant to group B, then it would help ease the pain. The reason for this is because we don’t expect all users to treat the site like it’s their email account and spend time learning to customize it; on the other hand, we need to welcome them where they will already feel comfortable and benefit directly from the experience without needing to spend time learning to customize…etc So if we can pre-customize it for each group and then they have the choice to change it, it would be great (plus the option to not show it in the homepage - by default it should be hidden in the homepage, probably a CSS code can fix this but then what about certain categories)

@sam

Would spelling stuff out better in the welcome topic help. To find your home please bookmark the following and add to sidebar, here are the steps

I’m not sure because there will be at least 50 topics for participants who enroll in all the courses. However. we are using @martin’s suggestion:

@martin

Or, if you have some internal document where you put the invitation link, add a link to the topic in the same place for convenience.

@Stephen

Why not set their home based on their primarily group ?

Thanks for the suggestion @Stephen! However, the homepage is for all members and we don’t want to change that. The course participants will participate in several courses but after each course they are invited to continue participating in the community.