User Invitation/Poking a user to a topic is now live!

[thomaspurchas]

Thanks for this! It makes this feature way more useful

But a couple of thing (I’m really sorry about this), I can’t seem to invite entire groups (my site uses SSO and I’m an admin, not sure if thats important), even on non-private topics groups are not appearing in the search/username box. Nor can I enter more than one username into the invite box.

Also for group invites, could group selectability be defined by the groups alias settings. i.e. If I’m a member for GroupA, and GroupA’s alias setting is “Only group members, moderators and admins” or similar, then I can always invite that group, regardless of my trust level / admin status.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Groups are not supported for invites at this time. Would be kind of risky.

[thomaspurchas]

Why are group invites more risky than group @mentions?

Both create a notification and an email, if anything invites are less risky because there rate limited unlike @mentions.

[elberet (Jens Maier)]

Awesome!

Shouldn’t it now be quite easy to also implement the “create only” security setting?

Simply allow users to create a new topic in the restricted category and be implicitly invited to the topic they just created…

---

@thomaspurchas

Why are group invites more risky than group @mentions?

Because a TL2 user could expose a private topic to the world by inviting the trust_level_0 group.

[thomaspurchas]

@elberet

Because a TL2 user could expose a private topic to the world by inviting the trust_level_0 group.

Please read the thread. This feature does not grant permissions.

@thomaspurchas

That’s what I thought this feature was, an @mention without the need to create a post, or munge a name into a sentence.

@codinghorror

That is what it is. People are trying to pervert it into a permission grant.

[elberet (Jens Maier)]

Hum. You’re right, sorry. I totally misinterpreted the change to lib/guardian.rb.

Too bad, this also invalidates the idea regarding create-only categories.

[thomaspurchas]

Sorry to poke you like this @codinghorror, but I was hoping to get your opinion on this:

@codinghorror

Groups are not supported for invites at this time. Would be kind of risky.

@thomaspurchas

Why are group invites more risky than group @mentions?

Both create a notification and an email, if anything invites are less risky because there rate limited unlike @mentions.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Group mentions needs to be redone before we’d attempt group invites.

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

So, I run a closed discourse… I normally tell people I’m going to invite them, then would visit my preferences and invite them.

The invitations they get from within a topic are WAY more interesting than normal. very cool…

It makes me want this feature implemented even more though… but I find my invites are being accepted more frequently, and I need to visit my invites page less often in general. AND they are already activated, which is double prizes.

Thanks again for this method of inviting people.

[jesselperry (Jesse Perry)]

I like this feature because it allows you to privately invite someone to a topic, without calling them out publicly and awkwardly forcing them to respond.

One idea although probably not trivial to implement - being able to email reply-to the invite to respond to the topic. Reduces friction even more, especially since you’re probably inviting someone that isn’t that engaged with the Discourse to begin with.