Just wanted to say thanks for this topic because I have similar onboarding concerns for my members, and similarities in community structure, though our community will not be invite-only – however, I was hoping Discourse would allow us to manage the “inviting my friend to join us” scenario. We’ll have to see if it works for us or if I stumble into the same issues as you (not sure I got a 100% clear picture of the problem).
We also have a very specialised topic that newcomers will be unfamiliar with, a very untechnical audience unfamiliar with Discourse, certain parts of the community firewalled off until members have cleared a couple of onboarding steps.
Right now the community is on Facebook and the way we manage onboarding is by creating a welcome post for each members, and then collecting “onboarding” posts by cohort (after a week, 6 weeks, 3 months, etc). I was thinking of managing that part with private messages but you saying that new members don’t find PMs concerns me a little!
Do your members get the PMs by e-mail too?