# Disabling registrations while allowing private invites
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/disabling-registrations-while-allowing-private-invites/403941
**Category:** Bug
**Tags:** invites, fixed
**Created:** [May 27, 2026, 6:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disabling-registrations-while-allowing-private-invites/403941 "2026-05-27T18:45:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Leaderboard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Leaderboard)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2026, 6:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disabling-registrations-while-allowing-private-invites/403941/1 "2026-05-27T18:45:51Z")
In a Discourse forum, suppose the setting Allow new registrations is disabled. I want to invite a user to a private group, however, that fails with the message “New account registrations not allowed at this time” even if the user already has an account on the site. I want to keep the `allow new registrations` setting disabled, while allowing invitation to any user with a forum account to a private group via a link. How can I do that? Manually adding invited users is not an option.
My research (with ChatGPT, Gemini and searching the web) shows that one way is to use invite-only mode while setting `allow new registrations` as enabled. However, this then results in us getting messages for every user asking for approval, which is a waste of time as only paid users can access the forums so the “invite” part is not useful. The problem with keeping invite-only mode disabled is that we did run into a case where a user was mass-creating accounts when `allow new registrations` was disabled so that won’t work either.
Note that we use SSO so users need to login to our main website, and then the system automatically creates an account on the forum if valid. As a result, keeping `allow new registrations` disabled normally works for us.
Many thanks in advance; if I missed a conversation, I would appreciate if you could point me to it.
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### Author:  [@chapoi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/chapoi)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2026, 3:02pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disabling-registrations-while-allowing-private-invites/403941/2 "2026-07-25T15:02:39Z")
Hello @Leaderboard
I think you’ve just discovered a genuine bug 🙂
I’ve made a fix for it here
>
>
> Previously, when \`allow\_new\_registrations\` was disabled, \`InvitesController\` blo…cked every visitor to an invite link, including already-registered users, who saw a "new account registrations not allowed" error even though they were not creating an account.
>
> This change skips the registration guard for logged-in users, so existing users can accept invites (for example, to join a group) while new-account signup stays closed.
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### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2026, 3:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disabling-registrations-while-allowing-private-invites/403941/3 "2026-07-27T15:27:37Z")