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 Chat testers - Discourse Meta 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. 