awlogan proposes a feature allowing group owners to include a “Add to groups” selection in their initial invite links. Currently, the workflow for managing beta testers is cumbersome, requiring Product Managers to send invites, monitor acceptances, manually add users to groups, and notify them. While admins can pre-assign groups during invitation, regular group owners cannot. The proposal suggests limiting owners to only those groups they manage to maintain security.
tobiaseigen and others argue this is more of a bug than a feature request. sjjh details a UI inconsistency: when admins create an invite from a group page, the group is pre-selected in the “link options”. However, when a regular user with invite privileges (who is a group owner) creates an invite from the same page, the group selection option is missing, resulting in the invitee not being added to the group. nina.d corroborates this, noting that while some link creation methods preserve the group parameter, others silently drop it, leading to unpredictable behavior without direct feedback to the creator.
The core issue is that the system restricts the “Add to groups” functionality to admins/mods, leaving non-admin group owners with a broken or incomplete user experience when inviting members directly from a group context. tobiaseigen reiterates the frustration, noting that even with recent updates, non-moderators with invite rights cannot achieve the seamless “invite-and-join-group” flow. The current workarounds involve admins creating the invite on behalf of the group owner or temporarily promoting the owner, which is inefficient for site owners managing multiple client-specific groups.
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.
