Invite multiple people to a topic

I often find myself wanting to invite multiple people to a topic – for example, to alert our support team and the relevant relationship manager to a post. As it stands, I have to invite each person individually, closing the modal each time. This was raised two or so years ago – and the advice was to use the API. That makes sense for lots of invites, but for just one or two, it’d be great to do this from the UI.

I do think it’s worthwhile imposing a limit here – maybe 5? – but the current limit of one is quite frustrating. The UI – admittedly not the text – suggests that multiple users would be supported, as it reuses the same user-selection control as for group membership.

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In this case particular case you could invite a group.

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I’d like this… in the wild, we end up seeing people use the path of least resistance in place of this, which looks like a post that just says:


@userA @userB @userC @userD

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That is actually better, IMO, since it is visible to everyone.

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Sometimes – if they’re all part of a group. :wink: The difficulty here is that I’d have to create a whole slew of groups – one each for the cross product of individual SRMs (“School Relationship Manager”), support leads, and system leads – which rapidly becomes quite a lot of groups.

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Hearing you. I’m curious though – aside from the peskiness of having to create all those groups in the first instance, what’s the downside of lots of groups?

Mainly just the peskiness of creating and managing those groups. Although admittedly I could probably have already created all of them in the time I’ve spent on this topic! :laughing: I’d also have to come up with reasonable names – I suspect I’d end up with groups with names like “jane+fred+ramesh” and “jane+alistair+kate”.

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There seemed to have been a wee bit of traction here and it died out. @HAWK, is this a change where y’all would welcome a PR? Especially since the new Share UI adds even more clicks to get to the invite dialog…

Update: To be clear, if y’all want to fix it, that’d be way better. But if you can’t, I can stumble through and figure it out and send in a PR :slight_smile:

Does your use case mean that inviting a group won’t work?

A group doesn’t work. It’s usually 5ish people but a random group of people.

If it’s only 5 is there a reason that you can’t just tag them in the post?

Tagging is visible to everyone, so I feel it:

  1. Adds pressure to the tagged person to respond when I just want them to be aware of the topic.
  2. Lets the community see too much of the puppeteering that goes on to get folks to participate in topics. It spoils the magic.
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