Multimastery reports a poor user experience when “Invite-only” and “Login required” are enabled. Users are forced through the full sign-up and email confirmation process, only to be blocked at the end because they lack an invite code. This was confirmed to be a specific gap in the Discourse ID flow for sites on the Free plan.
Moin initially suggested disabling the beta setting “enable local logins via code,” but Multimastery noted they already had that disabled. satonotdead recommended installing the discourse_skip_email_verification plugin to reduce friction, though warned about increased bot risk.
The root cause was identified by awesomerobot. Typically, “Invite-only” disables registration entirely. However, Free plan sites rely on Discourse ID, a centralized authentication system separate from the local site’s settings. Consequently, users can successfully create a Discourse ID account, but are blocked when redirected back to the invite-only site. The proposed solution is for Discourse to check the “invite-only” status before directing users to the Discourse ID signup process, preventing wasted effort. Multimastery confirmed they are on the Free plan, validating the diagnosis.
I’ve been testing with the ‘Invite-only’ ‘Login required’ settings enabled and the flow doesn’t make sense to me at all. What I don’t like is that it takes someone through the entire sign-up process, email confirmation and all, prompting them to fill out their profile and all - and then at the end it hits them with invite-only. That’s a total waste of someone’s time, a bad user experience, and makes no sense at all.
I went back & forth with the ‘AI Assistant’, but it’s just going around in circles agreeinf that it’s a bad user experience, but it’s still stumped for any solution.
So if an actual person can chime in on this issue, I’d appreciate it.
There is an upcoming change, enable local logins via code. It’s currently in beta status, so it is enabled by default. Did you try disabling that? There is a chance the experience is better with it disabled.
I don’t see exactly what you’re referring to. But I do see “Enable local logins via email”, and no, I don’t have that checked.
The closest thing I see that sounds like what your referring to is where it says ‘Invite only’ (which I have the box checked), and under it, it says ‘Invite code’ (which I left empty).
Are you on the discourse.org Free plan by any chance? this seems like a gap in our Discourse ID flow for logging in on Free sites.
Typically when “invite only” is enabled, registration is disabled entirely so you can’t reach that account creation flow.
But our Free plan requires Discourse ID as its auth system, which is a separate centralized Discourse registration system that isn’t directly controlled by your site.
So what happens is someone creates a Discourse ID, then that account gets sent back to log in to your site. Without invite-only this is somewhat invisible to the user, but when invite-only is enabled they can successfully create a new Discourse ID account, and hit a wall when directed back to your site.
We should check for invite-only before sending people to the Discourse ID signup process so we can prevent this sort of annoyance.