Overgrow reports an issue with creating invites with the arrive_at topic enabled as a non-staff user, noting that the field isn’t set in the database and can’t be edited later. The topic is public, and the invite button is correctly missing for non-public topics. Moin confirms that this limitation is by design and points to the relevant code. tobiaseigen acknowledges the current behavior but suggests considering this as a feature request, as it could be useful for non-staff members to specify the topic when creating an invite. Overgrow argues that the documentation suggests non-staff users can invite people to a topic in a public category, indicating a potential bug. tobiaseigen agrees that the documentation needs an update and notes that even admins face issues with the topic selection not being intuitive.
I’ve had trouble creating an invite with the arrive_at topic enabled as a user.
I can see the Invite button after clicking “Share” on the topic in public sections. But when I create the invite, the “arrive_at” field isn’t set in the database (I checked the topic_invites table with Data Explorer). When I edit the invite later, the “arrive_at” field doesn’t show up and can’t be edited.
I looked for related settings in both admin and group settings and couldn’t find any.
We’re not using must approve users. We have trust_level_2 in Invite allowed groups setting.
Seems like there must be some other setting (or hard-coded) limit to use topic invites.
UPDATE: I think this is a bug actually. I can reproduce this issue here on Meta in this very topic. It’s impossible to create an invite link with arrive at topic set (as a tl2 user, not staff).
The current behavior is by design. But I can see how it would be useful to allow members who are not moderators or admins to specify the topic when creating an invite, so I slipped this across to Contribute > Feature so it can be considered.
People want to set up their invite system in all sorts of ways. I talked to someone not too long ago who wanted to be able to set a default topic and not allow members to change it.
Hmm.. you’re right! There does seem to be something amiss here. Even as an admin, if I select the Share button on the topic menu and then Invite, the created invitation does not have the topic selected already. I don’t recall if this is by design but it certainly isn’t as intuitive as it could be.
That documentation topic does need an update too, so thanks for flagging that.