Are Moderated User Invites a thing?

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I can only seem to give moderators and admin invite permission, or allow all users above the trust threshold to have invite permissions. I am looking for a moderated user invite option if it exists, if not perhaps this belongs in feature as this is helpful for closed communites where we want to allow high trust users to invite but still be aware of new users and such in the moderator team.

So is Moderated User Invites a thing? Users send, moderators get notice to approve. If so, how do I do that? I have had a harder time tuning the install than I did installing docker in a multisocket environment for the first time! Thanks for the help from everyone in support so far and I’m sure in the future.

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To clarify, you’re asking if there is a way that all invites need to be approved by a moderator before they are sent?

Assuming yes, then no, that doesn’t currently exist.

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That’s one implementation, another possible implementation is that after invitation a moderator must “enable” the account.
Either way would be great as the discourse based system in working on is designed to be a semi closed system with referrals. For now I guess moderators have to act as the gatekeepers.

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There is a site setting called something like “must approve all users”. I think that is what you’re looking for.

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This setting removes all invite permissions for non staff members.
We were looking more for a system that the users issue the invites themselves, and a moderator approves them after they accept invitation. We’re exploring other options here, but the membership seems super resistant to having invites only in the hands of the moderators…

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I’m also curious to have something like this, were you able to find a solution that worked?

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The way I’d go about this is to have a “waiting room” that anyone can join and then put the real community in group-restricted categories. Here’s how it might work:

  1. Anyone can join Discourse without restriction.
  2. Create one category that anyone can see. It might be read-only or unrestricted depending on what makes sense for your community.
  3. Create a closed group that can only be joined when a group owner approves.
  4. Decide who gets to be a group owner and make them owners of the group. :wink: This can be moderators, staff or anyone you like.
  5. Create new categories that are stricted to the closed group. This is where the real community participates.

One advantage of an open waiting room is that new people can ask about the community before they really join. But I think it would also work to have the waiting room static with a single topic explaining the process.

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Wow, I love this solution and appreciate you taking the time to write it up so clearly. I’ll test it out and see how it goes, thank you!

Edit: the only problem I have with this is that every new category will need to be restricted…is there any way where I could just create one unrestricted category instead of having to create every category except one as restricted?

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Other than manually? Not that I know of. But how often do you need new categories? :wink:

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Fair point, I’m not sure. I think I’ve imagined as the community grows then people may create a lot of sub-categories, but 1) maybe they won’t and 2) I think sub-categories can have permissions inherited from main category. So maybe it’ll work out fine :slightly_smiling_face:

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Every community is different, of course, but people are fundamentally lazy when it comes to organization. :wink: In my experience people avoid starting new topics if they can get away with it. When people ask about new categories, they frequently mean they wish someone was posting about the subject and when the category is actually created, they don’t use it. Probably best to avoid creating new subcategories until it becomes blindingly obvious they are needed.

Correct. You can make a subcategory more restrictive, but Discourse won’t let you make one less restrictive.

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Exacly. A category itself never generates discussion. Therefore there can be demand to category if i.e. certain tag gets a lot of topics and those topics aren’t crossing with other categories too much.

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