Remove Invite Spam Protection?

Feature
1

To protect Invite feature from potential spam, Discourse has a restriction:

A user can’t send more than one invite to same email.

This restriction is limiting use of Disposable Invite Tokens feature. Let me explain:

While generating tokens Admin specifies the group(s), to which user will be added once he redeems invite.

This feature is particularly useful when Admin wants to invite multiple users to a private group. This means that if the existing user will redeem invite, he will automatically be added to that private group.

Now due to invite spam restriction, system will throw error if the user who is redeeming the invite was already invited previously by the same Admin who sent this disposable invite.

This means that Admin can’t invite existing invited user to a private group using Disposable Invite Tokens feature.

Should we remove Invite spam protection? Please provide feedback/suggestions for this.

cc @stevebaer @sam @eviltrout @codinghorror

2

What about just removing it for Admins?

3

I’m not sure removing it would be the best answer to the problem.

Maybe split Invites into two types? eg.
forum_invite - restricted
group_invite - reusable

4

Sure, remove it for moderators and admins, they can spam users anyway with a multitude of other ways, they have their emails.

4 Likes
5

That sounds great. Could you please let me know when this restriction has been removed and our server has been updated? We would like to test this again as soon as possible.

6

@techAPJ can you update here once change is implemented and merged …

2 Likes
7

Implemented and merged:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/2603

1 Like
8

Has this been deployed to our server? I was just about to cross my fingers and send out an email under the older system, but would rather test this first if it is available.

9

Its deployed now :slight_smile: just pushed the button

10

Great!! Just sent out 700 emails to our resellers; maybe one or two won’t be on vacation and we’ll start seeing if this worked.

Thanks a lot for doing this guys; this should work great for what we are working on.

11

Can you share any more about what you are doing with this feature? Now I’m curious…

12

We our currently organizing an event at the end of October for our network of resellers. In order to figure out what we want to actually achieve at the event we wanted to have a discussion with these people on a private category on our discourse instance (http://discourse.mcneel.com/).

We are also experimenting with inviting people in phases to test out the next version of our application and these people can discuss issues with the “future version of Rhino” on a private category. Our software has enough new users now that many aren’t used to our development process and may consider our first WIP as something close to final release candidate (which is not even close to the case.) People that have been using Rhino for a long time know that our development process is to get things to users as quick as possible in order to get feedback. Many times these features are pretty ratty during early phases of development (or they don’t even exist yet.)

3 Likes
13

By the way; so far so good. We are already starting to see new users show up and automatically get added to the appropriate group!

4 Likes
15

Thanks for the explanation! I can totally see making use of this feature in a similar fashion now…