Please I would like to know how to change the ‘You were invited by:’ user. I want it to be an invitation from the system because it doesn’t represent one individual. The invitation is from the community. This is very critical. Thank you! (:
You can impersonate system from the /admin/user page.
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It actually hides the impersonate for system and the only thing you can see is:
Maybe there’s something I can change in the settings, thanks!
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Hmm. Where are you hosted? If it’s with Discourse.org then you might email support. I tested on a recently upgraded self-hosted install before I made the recommendation and my screen looks like:
And then I clicked it and became system. I didn’t create an invite, though.
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Thanks! I will contact the responsible person for these site settings. 
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If you’re a moderator and not an admin, then that explains it. Of course you can’t impersonate a user with more privileges than you have.
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I think its only the sysadmin/developer email in the app.yml that can impersonate the system? I’ve just given admin rights to a test user, and they don’t get the impersonate option for system.
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Sounds right. I forget that developer is different, as it’s most often the way that I get admin access.
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Okay thank you, I will look into that! I appreciate your help! 
So if I’m able to impersonate System, will I be able to change the owner of the invite links? It’s better than creating the links all over again and adding them back to context!
Thanks in advance!
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No. You would be able to create links as System. I don’t think that you can easily change their owner. Given that I’m right, you’d need to do it at the rails console. If there are many of them, then you’d need to see Administrative Bulk Operations for some clues on how to do some things in bulk. I doubt that there’s an exact example, though.
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Thanks! (:
I think it’d be a good and helpful feature if we could change the owner (just like when we are allowed to change post ownership).
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Hi Gassim! Can you tell us some more about your use case? How are you sharing these invites? The idea behind “ownership” of invites is that there is trust between the inviter and the person they are inviting, which helps to build the community. The inviter also is able to monitor their pending invites and resend invites as needed, is notified when their invites are accepted, and also gets credit for accepted invitations.
If you don’t want all this, then I’d suggest you change your admin settings to allow new users to sign up directly. Or I guess you could sign up as a user representing the community that you are allowed to impersonate who is not system.
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Thanks @tobiaseigen! I ended up choosing this option.
Thanks for your questions! I explained more details about the use case in the topic: Invite limit to unlimited!; however, the option to change ownership is because we’re inviting course participants to the discussion forum and the community/course…etc doesn’t represent one individual so ‘Person invited you to join the discussion forum’ doesn’t represent the purpose of the invitation.
In short, I didn’t know it was going to say ‘person invited you’ because I used Admin, so I thought it would say the site invited you… and then when I was testing I saw that message and now I want to change the ownership of the links instead of having to create links and replace them in course content all over again! (:
I hope I clarified the use case well! It’s still being tested and thank you so much for your support.
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Reading your use-case:
…I wanted to share a similar experience I had, where we needed to leave a link in documentation that got people to the correct, private category when they followed it. And given how the system works…
…didn’t work for us, since it was a call to action for the residents of a city, making it unreasonable for us, per city guidelines.
I combined two features of Discourse:
- User groups for permissions
- Permalinks
When one links directly to a group they may request to join (per settings of that group), there is a “Request” button. If you visit https://meta.discourse.org/g/chat-testers you’ll see something similar:
Pressing the “Request” button will take the users into the process of signing up/joining that group.
Because we didn’t want to send links that looked like https://example.org/g/neighborhood, we opted to send redirects. And because we wanted both control over them (city privacy policies, which are great!), as well as being able to update the link if needed, we used the native permalink settings in Discourse, available at /admin/customize/permalinks.
Then in our docs we leave a message such as:
Thanks for you interest in this course, to complete the lessons, please join Course 1 at https://forums.example.edu/student-invite.
Which with the permalink redirection in the screenshot would load https://forums.example.edu/g/Students, and proceed to onboard the student.
I enjoyed this method, as it gave our mods similar tools to onboard groups, while keeping the invite system flexible. 
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Thank you so much @maiki for sharing! I think your idea is very great; ~however, my question is if the ‘request to join’ will appear for a user who has not yet signed in to the forum (anonymous users)? And if it appears, does it redirect them to the topic after they request to join? update: I tested it but it doesn’t redirect users to the specific topic.
The other issue is that participants will have to wait until their request is accepted. Did you automate that? (I think this is valid in the settings, right?) edit: I checked and there is no way to automate acceptance to the group (in the same way as the invite links do) and this means that participants will have to wait until a group owner accepts their request but for courses that are international we can’t guarantee being 24 hours present to immediately accept requests and there is no way to make participants wait!
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There is an option that’s something like “allow users to join and leave the group freely”. But meting it’s not available if the group is hidden.
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Thanks, but not only that the group must be visible it but doesn’t work with the option ‘request to join’.
It’s still an option to look at but the issue is this would work only if we can guarantee that course participants will sign up into the forum early on and using the first invitation!
Thanks!
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We pinned informative topics in the respective categories; in my use case we had complex subject matter to discuss, so we broke it into separate topics to make it easier to digest and discuss.
Correct, the method I prescribed doesn’t work as well with private groups…
Taking it all together… maybe you could automate this workflow of yours, via Discourse Automation. Set it up so when a user joins a group, they get sent a PM with a link to the topic you want them to read…?
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This is why I’m using invitation links because that’s what it is supposed to do:
- Add user to private group
- Redirects user to the topic post
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