Throw warning when inviting user who is already tracking/watching

Feature
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I sometimes invite people here on Meta to specific topics when I see they haven’t been involved yet but I know they’d have great input to share. I’m always a little hesitant to do so though, because they might have already seen the topic and was planning to reply, or simply wasn’t interested.

When I invite someone to a topic, and that person is already tracking/watching/muted that topic, wouldn’t it make sense to let me know about that status before sending off the invitation? In most cases, given that information, I’d probably drop the invite.

5 Likes
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Possibly, @techapj that would be an improvement to the invite dialog logic I think?

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Do we really want to expose the tracking state a user has to potential strangers?

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Does not seem very risky to me.

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In that case, can we at least make sure that getting this information is rate limited, so it cannot be crawled easily?

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Keep in mind you need an account that is TL2 to even be allowed to invite users, so the information disclosure is already quite limited.

If this becomes an “are you sure” dialog then user is already limited to 10 invites per day, so it is effectively rate limited, unless everyone on the forum is already watching/tracking everything or you are trying to fish to see which topics I am not tracking (hint almost 0)

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If someone has already been invited by another user, Discourse already tells you that, right? That message could be reused for this case to get across the bring a horse to water but can’t make them drink nature of topics.

“That user has previous been invited or is tracking this topic already.”

5 Likes