It is great that we can direct the invitees to a topic via Send to topic on first login. Would it be possible to direct them to a specific category as an alternative?
I know that we can direct them to the About topic of the category of interest, but that isn’t the actual thing I want them to see first. Instead, I want them to see the conversations in that category. The issue is that for a noob, getting to the topic list of a category isn’t super obvious.
This of course might be non-trivial because I don’t know of any field in Discourse that combines both categories and topics. But you guys are smart!
Thanks for your appreciation of the invite system improvements!
I think I understand your request and it’s interesting. Can you tell me some more about your use case and what you are trying to achieve? Are you inviting a bunch of different kinds of people to your forum who you want to send to different parts of your forum that everyone has access to? Or are you inviting them to private categories? Or is everyone joining your site facing the same challenge of understanding where to start? Do you have some concrete examples you can share? What are people saying who are trying to join your community and participate in discussions?
Have you thought about simplifying your forum, by switching desktop category page style to Boxes with featured topics and display categories on the home page instead of latest? Or adding a banner with information that helps orient people?
Along the lines @Rhidian suggests, you could also write a topic for each of these different types of users with a brief introduction to the forum, maybe with some screenshots or even a video, and some links.
Thanks Robert - I haven’t yet used that plugin because the structure of my site (too many groups with too many categories per group) meant that it would need more development to work for us. But things have improved on that front so maybe it is time to give it a crack.
Hi Nathan! Trusting all is well on your end. I just came across this topic again and saw it has gone quiet. Does this mean that you are satisfied with the way invite-to-topic works currently? Do you have any update from your community on how this is working for them and if it can be improved?
Yup - invite to topic works just fine. I confess that I don’t actually use it much though, and instead use Custom Wizard Plugin 🧙 to have a joining wizard to allocate them to a specific group and then use the groups to give a softly tailored view via permissions and watching.
Well, since you ask, there is a current issue that prevents us from effectively using both invites and public registration at the same time which I’d really like to have addressed:
