Our forum moderators determined that they’d rather have the community invite the ‘moderators’ group to a topic that needs attention as opposed to creating a post, and using @moderators.
However, this is the error message that pops-up when I try to invite the moderators group:
Initially thought that “rate limited” referred to how many users I could invite in a 24-hour period, but as a “Regular”, I tested this theory by inviting 20+ users to a topic within several minutes.
Perhaps “rate limited” could also refer to how many users can be invited in one-go but our moderators group consists of a measly 14 users.
Another theory I had was that one of the users, “system”, couldn’t be invited, but that theory proved wrong too. I tested inviting each moderator individually to a topic to make sure that it wasn’t a problem with their account but it seems to be fine (I could manually invite all the moderators).
Additional Information:
The forum that we’re using doesn’t use email for accounts, but is linked and created by another account unique to each user.
Unfortunately we don’t have another group on our forum, so I can’t see if I can invite other groups besides moderators. And the admin is never active, so it’s hard to get into contact.
I just noticed that most Discourse forums don’t have the Invite feature for normal topics, just messages. However, would the behavior of a ‘normal’ topic and a message be the same?
Topics do have an “invite” feature. The default Admin -> Settings -> Trust Level -> “default invitee trust level” is Trust Level 1
If you aren’t seeing the feature below a topic, perhaps this Setting is set higher?
If you go to Admin -> Groups -> Automatic -> moderators
Is “Who can message and @mention this group?” set to Everyone?
There are times (and I can’t think of any examples at all right now ) when I don’t want to flag a topic because the connotation is that the post is “bad”, but I just want moderators to see it.
But it does get the job done (gets mods to see it).
I’d still like to know why the mod group can’t be invited to any topics, and what the words “rate-limited” actually mean, if you don’t mind.
Flag does not equal bad. I think that’s where some of the concern lies. Flag is “hey, I need to get staff attention” for something. What’s something, well it might be bad, or it could simply be that a user needs staff for some reason. On one of the sites I moderate, we get flags for things like “hey, could you move this topic here”, or “hey, think you might like to see this”.
To use a real life example, my family once went to a giant corn maze. This was a maze so big that there were staff sitting in a watchtower in the center of the maze to keep an eye on things. All parties entering the maze were given a flag on a large stick, otherwise they had no way of communicating with the tower. The flag would be raised up and waved to get the towers attention for any reason. Most of the time the flag was used for “we give up, help us out please”, but it could also be used for something more important, like “I’ve found someone who fainted from the heat, send help!”.
I think the main problem I have, being a user, is that the mods removed the option to “mark as other”, and the only options right now are spam, off-topic and inappropriate – hence where my notion of “bad” comes from.
But since it serves its purpose, I’m done here. Thanks.
That is indeed a problem. Did the mods provide a reason for removing the “something else” option? If not, I’d suggest making a topic in #meta (or site feedback, depending on the name) and asking. Give details as to why it would be useful, and respectfully ask why it was removed.
) when I don’t want to flag a topic because the connotation is that the post is “bad”, but I just want moderators to see it.