# Automating bulk invite

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/automating-bulk-invite/164259>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [September 16, 2020, 5:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/automating-bulk-invite/164259 "2020-09-16T17:57:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![yaxu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/yaxu/32/178942_2.png) [@yaxu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/yaxu)\
**Post date:** [September 16, 2020, 5:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/automating-bulk-invite/164259/1 "2020-09-16T17:57:30Z")

</div>

Hi all,  
I was looking for an API feature that, for a given email address, added a user to a group or two, inviting them to the forum if they didn’t already have an account. I couldn’t find that feature, but noticed that this is exactly what the ‘bulk upload’ invite feature does. This isn’t documented in the API, but is what the browser does.

So I did the same, using the following php code to POST a csv file:

```php
        $body = "--ossifrage\r
Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"type\"\r
\r
csv\r
--ossifrage\r
Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"files[]\"; filename=\"test.csv\"\r
Content-Type: text/csv\r
\r
$order_email,$group_names\r
\r
\r
--ossifrage--\r
";
$r=wp_remote_post( 'https://club.tidalcycles.org/invites/upload_csv.json', array(
                    'method' => 'POST',
                    'headers' => array('Content-Type' => 'multipart/form-data; boundary=ossifrage', 
                                       'Api-key' => '(redacted)',
                                       'Api-Username' => 'yaxu'),
                    'body' => $body
                    )
                 ); 

```

This worked great for a couple of months, but has recently stopped working, with the following error in the discourse logs: `Can't verify CSRF token authenticity.`

Is this an bug, as I should be authenticated via the API key? Or am I on to a loser trying to use undocumented parts of the API?

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/automating-bulk-invite/164259)._