When atting someone, you may write something about their relevant experience that they probably might not want to talk about in that particular topic.
Not everyone might like when you force-invite them by mentioning in a topic. This may make others think they the invitee ignores the invitation.
The main point, though, is that they might not like the introduction you make about them in context of the topic. I prefer people do it on their own. And I prefer giving the flexibility to silently ignoring my invitation without traces in the topic, so I just use “Invite” button, that’s all.
But I use it “intelligently”
I only invite people when they are online and …
…let me avoid content duplication, read more about how we invite people to participate here:
Hmmm, thinking about it, if it’s always the OP (considered to be the topic) that is sent, it would at times be nice to have an excerpt of a different post in that topic instead. eg.
How do I solve XYZ?
Try A
Try B
Try C
Try D
If somemember might not know much about ABC but I know he’s keen about D, and I invite him. there is some chance he might shrug off XYZ without reading the topic through, but if he saw D he would be more interested.
I don’t know if having per post invites would be a good approach, and sending a Message would cover it, But having a way to choose the excerpt if not too difficult to implement and considered useful enough could work.
@mcwumbly where would this context go for existing users, as all we do is send a notification in the notification panel, which is literally a single line. There’s no email to hold the extra content…
I think that’s only sent if the user isn’t active on the site at the moment. Normally it is a simple one-line notification in the notification panel.
So at the moment it would be “enter this optional text, which may be completely thrown away and never seen if the user is active on the site at the moment”. Is that OK? I dunno.
I wasn’t sure what the flow was until the answers in this topic so far.
It would probably only make sense to allow extra text for existing users if it automatically converted the invite to a PM (kind of like what happens in the “I want to message the user” part of the flag dialog).
