I was trying to invite a user to a forum topic a second time. The first time i did the invite, i didn’t have the user in the right group. I was thinking that the system was going to throw a error during the invitation, or it was going to track that I invited that user and allow that user to access that topic. Neither happend. The user got a permission error when they tried to accept the invitatioin.
So i created a group, put that user in it, and then tried to invite the user again. This time specifying the group the user was in (“This invite also includes access to these groups”) along with the username. I got the following message:
Sorry, that user has already been invited. You may only invite a user to a topic once.
How can i solve the problem of getting the user access without recreating the topic?
Is this a topic in a secured category? If it is, you must include group membership (the relevant group that has access to the secured category that the topic is in) in the invite, for the invite to work.
@codinghorror, It is in a protected category. Just to confirm, if i have a protected category with multiple threads, and I want to give someone access to only one of those threads, I have to give them access to the whole category (consequently…all threads)? If that is the case, is there a way around that?
There is no concept of per-topic permissions in Discourse. If you want that, you need to send a PM (Personal Message) which does have per-topic permissions.
A work around I think we’ll be able to use is with sub-categories. Here is a example i’m working with:
The layout…
Content Management (parent category, protected access to cm (content management) group)
-Videos (sub category, protected access to cm group and videos group)
-Videos-VENDOR (sub category, protected access to cm group, videos group and videos-VENDOR group)
I change the group permissions for videos-VENDOR to reply, view. Then if a thread in “Videos” warrants vendor access, I move the topic to “Videos-VENDOR” along with any other topic I want vendors to have access to. Then i can change what they can do via their user level.
One issue with the above is that if the vendor doesn’t have access to the parent category, they can view the sub-category items that show up in “Latest” and click on the topic title to interact. However, if they click the sub-category title, they get an error “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” @codinghorror, so the work around that allows sub-category access without giving parent access might be a security bug-turned-feature
Although if that loop hole was closed, the better method would be to give the vendor access to the cm group so it had access to the parent, but don’t give them access to the other subcategories.
This does happen. If the topic belongs to a restricted category we add invited user access to those allowed groups.
But the user was logged in, right?
So if the user is logged in (I assume so because the second invite was via username) add the user to the required group manually and they should be able to view the topic.
On a new installation, this did not happen. The user (already logged in) got a permissions error saying they didn’t have access to the topic which means when the topic belongs to a restricted category, the user was not automatically added to the allowed groups on invitation. So maybe this is a bug or its as Jeff stated “you must include group membership” and it’s not automatic.
The problem was in the context of allowing a user access to a single topic in a category while not allowing that user to view any other topics in that category. Based on Jeffs response (no per-topic permissions), that’s not possible, which is why I’m doing the work around in my previous post.
