awlogan requested that group owners be allowed to include a group in the initial invite, simplifying a five-step beta testing workflow into two. dax supported this, suggesting an “Invite” button specifically for owners. sjjh later characterized the issue as a bug rather than a feature request, noting that while admins see a group selection dropdown on the group page invite form, non-admin group owners do not, leading to inconsistent behavior. tobiaseigen moved sjjh’s report into this topic and proposed a new allowed_by_group setting to grant this permission to specific users, restricting them to groups they own.
nina.d highlighted further confusion, noting that link creation buttons on group pages behave inconsistently regarding group parameters. tobiaseigen initially struggled to find a workaround for non-admin group owners needing to invite clients directly into private groups. However, tobiaseigen later confirmed that the functionality now works as intended: non-admin group owners with invite privileges can see the “Add to groups” option in the advanced invite popup and select their own group, provided they perform a hard refresh or wait for permission propagation.
I’ve been trying to find a way to simplify group adds for our beta test user groups. Right now it’s a bit of work for our product managers, they have to:
Send invites to customers to create a profile
Customers open the email link and complete a profile
PM monitors invites and see who accepted them
PMs add the people who accepted the invites to the Beta Group
PMs send an email / private message to the customer that they can now access the Beta Group
I know as an admin I can add groups to the invite per this post: Invite users to a group, but I don’t really want to make these guys admins just to save a couple of steps.
What would be ideal is if the group owner could add the group to the initial invite, but be limited to the groups they own. In this case they would only be allowed to select the Beta Tester group, and not my employee, staff, or other groups.
As a stretch goal it would be nice if the email or private message could also be sent automatically when the user signs up. This would take the process down from 5 steps to 2 steps.
I’m in the same situation, and I think that add an Invite button only for owners so they can send invitations to other users to join the group is a good solution to start. Something like this:
Platform: all (I assume). Tested with Discourse 3.6.0-beta1-dev
Description:
There are two places to create an invite:
main menu
within a group page
As an admin or moderator I can create an invite within the group page. Opening the “link options“ within the pop-up dialog the respective group is pre-selected, thus invited people end up in the group directly. That’s great.
If I as a group owner and normal user (member of a group having rights to create invites) create a new invite on a group page the “link options“ part is missing the option to pre-select a group.
Expected behavior
As a group owner and normal user (having rights to create invites) creating an invite from a group page, the pop-up dialog shall contain the possibility to pre-select (a) group(s) and be prefilled with the respective group. The drop-down shall contain all groups the user has rights to create invites for.
Reproducible steps:
log in as admin
create invite from within a group page
observe, that within the “link options” a group-field is available, with the respective group being pre-selected
observe, that the invited user is added to the pre-selected group.
be happy
log in as a normal user (being a group owner and being member of a group having rights to create invites)
create invite from within a group page you are owner of
observe, that within the “link options” no group-field is available
observe, that the invited user is not added to any group.
be unhappy
Thanks for your work!
PS: It seemed, that this has worked four years ago.
PPS: There is also a feature request pending for this. But after thinking through this, for me it’s more a bug than a feature request as the button I’m talking about is within the group page (I’m not meaning the button in the main navigation) (plus the behavior for the button is intransparently different for moderators/admins).
Thanks, Simon! I moved your topic into a reply to the feature request because I agree with @sam it belongs here.
You’ve done a great job updating the issue raised in the OP here, given more recent changes to the invite system since this topic was created. The tl;dr is that admins are allowed to create invites whereby the invitee is added to one or more groups immediately as they create their accounts. Regular members who are group owners cannot.
It feels to me like it should be possible for site owners to grant access to the “Add to groups” pulldown when creating an invite, perhaps using a new allowed_by_group setting? If it’s allowed, then they can only select groups that they are owners of.
I can imagine use cases though when site owners might not want to allow it. If it is not allowed, then the invite button should not be shown on the group page for that member even if they are a group owner. Maybe removing it would be the right first move to make, so the UI is at least consistent.
I stumbled into a very much related issue, just that the behavior is even a little different to it being described here, but it’s also been a year.
The tl;dr is that admins are allowed to create invites whereby the invitee is added to one or more groups immediately as they create their accounts. Regular members who are group owners cannot.
If I am a non-admin group owner who’s been granted invitation rights, I can actually invite people with a link that I created (and that has a group parameter) onto the platform as well as into the (one) group in the same step?
My issue is, that the available link creation buttons on the group page have different results for which the creator receives no direct feedback, as described here. So I agree that this is more of a bug than a feature.
I see that there is also the invite option via the profile page and if I create a link there it will not have a group parameter. I expect this. But if I invite through the group page, I expect to invite into the group no matter what.
I just came across this issue today for myself! I am creating groups on my site for my clients to give them access to their own category, to which I want them to be allowed to invite as many people as they like to join the site and their private group+category.
Even with all the improvements to the invite system recently, this is still not possible as far as I can see. Non-moderators/admins can be given invite privileges, but then have to wait for the invitee to join before adding them to the group. Unless I am missing something, hopefully?
The workaround is for me to create the invite as moderator or admin, or to promote them temporarily, masquerade as them and create the invite on their behalf.
Just testing this again today and realized that it actually does work now. If a user is allowed to invite and is a group owner, they see the “Add to groups” option on the “advanced mode” invite popup, and can select their own group there.
I guess I had to do a hard refresh or wait for some process to complete to give the user access.
