We are trying to move from a mailing list based organisation, the first step (done) was to mirror the mailing list to build an archive, and now we want to leave it hybrid for a while, with some users mostly using discourse as a mailing list + online archive, the others using discourse online.
Discourse works quite ok as a mailing list replacement: each list is a category restricted to a group, and to be a member of the list you are a member of the group.
We then can set up the notification level of that group so by default, it watches the category.
What I didn’t solve yet is the registration, the new user needs first to create an account, then request membership to the group (the best we found is to direct them to the welcome topic in the category and hit the “request access” button), then wait until someone approve the request and go to the category (or wait until a new post ends up in her inbox)
It would smooth things if we could merge the registration (as a user)+ request to join a group
Searching this forum, I haven’t found a way to do that. Am I missing something? Do you have suggestions to make it easier for the users to join a group as part of the registration process?
This should be achievable if you created staged users while importing your mailing list to discourse.
if these users come from a specific email domain (@example.com) then the groups can be set so that the members are automatically assigned the given group(s) based on their email address.
Another way is to send them invites with group membership assigned upon accepting the invite.