I’m trying to make a nice generic invite for my community.
We’ve made a user with a nice username and name to appear on the invite screen.
But the number of invites is limited to 10, and the timeframe is limited to three months.
Is there a way to bypass the limit to create a generic invite with a large number of uses that we can post on our website and other socials so we can drive traffic to our discourse site?
Do you want all users to be able to invite, or just limit this one particular account or selected ones? If latter, I guess you could set min trust level to allow invite to TL4 then assign those users to that trust level.
Ok I think I may have figured it out. Use a staff account. The setting shown below: invite link max redemptions limit applies to staff accounts. Also max invites per day doesn’t appear to be limited by staff.
I’m confused as to why you don’t just make a designated staff account for this? I think I am just misunderstanding what you are trying to do. My apologies.
For this bit, I think if you use the invite button from the topic itself it should allow a normal user to have an ‘arrive at topic’ version. Though the topic has to be in a public category:
I still have the "validation failed’ error - which I am guessing occurred because I set the user invite settings back to their defaults. (I’m assuming regular users are limited, and new users cannot send invites at all for good reasons)
As it stands my options are; demote a staff user, or create an invite user with the steps
relax invite constraints for all users (5000 day, 5000 invites per user)
create a special user with the name ‘community invite’,
go to the ‘Welcome new users’ topic while impersonating user
create the invite with the maximum number of uses (length defaults to 14 years)
Noting that I must not reset the invite settings to their defaults or the invite will trigger a ‘Validation failed’ error and be unusable.
By comparison Discord communities have generic invites like https://discord.gg/elixir that go straight to their onboarding or nominated channel.
I’m not being facetious, but invite links, outside of a private, exclusive community don’t provide enough benefits, in my opinion.
If you share how your community is configured, I could give specific advice. Here’s what I’ve done with Discourse in the past:
Create a welcome topic explaining stuff, and inviting the public to join the forums, explaining it’s low traffic, no spam, run by whichever org, etc. (the invite page)
Take that topic URL and create a permalink for it in Discourse, so https://forums.examples.org/you-are-invited → https://forums.example.org/t/welcome/1234.
Share https://forums.examples.org/you-are-invited on social media
In this scenario the forums were public, and user could sign up without pre-approval. That permalink is “evergreen”, because I can change where it points; I can publish it online, in print, as a QR code, etc.
That’s one content-driven approach to inviting new members.