I still don’t fully understand how the staged user functionality works but am wondering if it can be employed to support our outreach workflow.
We spend alot of our time inviting people to join our network. It would be really helpful if moderators could send a PM to an email address and for it to be associated with a new staged user, so if they reply the message remains with there so we can keep an eye on it and follow up. When they do join the staged user would become a full user, and we can mark it completed.
As it is, we use PMs actively to support people once they are signed up and have to use email before they sign up.
I would love to see this. We use Discourse as a shared inbox to handle incoming mail, but sometimes we have to actively send an email “from the team” to a not-yet-user.
Currently, we privately send an email and set reply-to to the group inbox address, but this means that Discourse misses the first post.
I do see this as strategic because it is an easy way to grow a community. Conceptually we simply want to allow you to add email addresses into the PM to field.
In my case, most staged users will never be able to sign in (but can interact via email as normal), and it even works fine if a staged user does eventually log in via SSO – the staged account is upgraded and associated to the external account.
Awesome! My community consists of academics and academic support staff and I’ve been trying to figure out how to interact with external vendors without actually giving them access to the site.
That is very close to my use case, an academic course (with Discourse for internal communication and for students). We also use incoming mail to deal with externals – and outgoing mail would be perfect for that
Aah, now I understand why it looked like duplicati already knew a user that I was about to invite (to a topic, I think it was). I have to say that I found that somewhat confusing, at least in the invite modal. Could this email dropdown thingy be suppressed in this case?
I just realized that I forgot to test this functionality and have now turned staged users off again on my site for a bit. Can you confirm that when you add addresses into the PM to field and send the message, a staged user is created for that email address? Or is it only when that staged user replies?
I’m hopeful that it’s the former. If so, then the planned tag can be removed.
Update - I did a quick test and can confirm that I am not able to send personal messages to email addresses when staged users is disabled. When I briefly enabled staged users and hard refreshed my browser, I was able to send a personal message and the staged user was created. So I can answer my own question and confirm that this is done. Many thanks indeed @nbianca!
FYI - I am doing this regularly now and it’s working quite well. I like this workflow for inviting people to join the network, esp in combo with using messages as a ticket system.
Thanks @sam and co for making messaging email addresses a reality!
Today I was missing the ability to store some more info about staged users as I write the message to create them. It automatically chooses the username based, I think, on the first part of the email address. This is not bad but not easily identifiable in some cases and might lead to weird usernames (eg info1). With SSO the username and email has to match as well, otherwise a new user is created when the person does sign up that then has to be merged.
I don’t have answers to all of these issues and am still experimenting. But one initial thought is to perhaps allow setting The person’s name and username at send, e.g. first last, username, email@foo.com. Or maybe that’s overkill and I need to simply to be able to edit the details later on the user admin.
