User invite process improvements

(Alan Levine) #6

I will second or third this (as if I have a say).

Email is turning into a nightmare for our project, partly our own design, we had people submit their emails into a google form because they had to enter two other addresses they would be grouped with.

We have malformed emails, emails with typos etc, but once we cleaned all those, well it seems like 60% of our recipients are having the emails flagged as spam (and if you work with general non techie folks, maybe 10% might know where to look).

It would help us a lot to message people an invite link, even ok to add a shorter expiry time stamp.

Thanks discoursers!

(Arpit Jalan) #7

We have this feature now! :gift:

(Allen - Watchman Monitoring) #8

WOW! Thank you @techAPJ and Team!!

This is fantastic. Updating now.

(Allen - Watchman Monitoring) #9

I invite all people to a topic that is a Guide to the best of this forum.

Would it be easy enough to expand this to the invite to a specific article feature?

(Jeff Atwood) #10

Sure I agree with that, @techapj can you cover this case as well? Same UI buttons.

(Allen - Watchman Monitoring) #11

Great feature request here in this topic @fysics, I’ll use this every day.

This can be done as such: Generating lots of Invite Tokens

(Arpit Jalan) #12

Ok, done! :confetti_ball:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/eb96016043fa646b486f04790ff31eed60234a06

(Allen - Watchman Monitoring) #13

This is really fantastic. :confetti_ball: :dancers: :boom:

Link to an already invited user?
(Allen - Watchman Monitoring) #14

Not only is the link that we get more inviting when I send it to a new person, but it’s also a way to easily tell if the person is already a member without shooting them an email if they weren’t.

This provides me so much more control & less questions in the entire invite process, and takes my use to just the right spot in one fell swoop.

What a great add on to Discourse!

(Eoin Ryan) #15

This is an old thread; but it’s the best match I’ve found to the query I have. Much like Zane who made the first post; I have an invite-only community and would like to either set the username for each invited user (preferred) or else allow them to set it with their password when they click on the invite link.

Is there an option to do that; I haven’t found any options in the invite process. Any good workarounds?

The change username setting doesn’t really help in this case; if I set it to non-zero they can’t edit it as soon as they join and if I set it to zero they can’t edit it all; if I understand that setting correctly.

(Jeff Atwood) #16

Let’s confirm with @techapj but I believe this is possible.

(Arpit Jalan) #17

If you want to pre-stage username while inviting, there is only one option and that is generating invite links via Discourse API gem. Here is the howto:

(Eoin Ryan) #18

Thanks. Unfortunately it’s too technical for me (at this stage). I don’t
know what Gem is or if we have it; and I’d be nervous to break it if I
tweaked it!

Still; will point our admin to it and check it out, and see where it lands
on the list.

Appreciate the link (and clarity that uploading a csv won’t help me).

(Nico) #19

(Sorry for reviving thread) Is this feature planned? Currently evaluating Discourse for building a new (invite-only) community, however one requirement would be the possibility of sending invite links over instant messaging without exchanging email addresses. (So basically generating invite links without entering an email address at all.)

I’d try to implement this myself but I’m not quite comfortable enough with my Ruby skills.

(Mittineague) #20

Hi nkr, welcome to the forum

It is possible to invite members to topics by username or email address. You do not need to use email addresses.

(Nico) #21

Oh sorry, what I meant was inviting new users to the forum, not a specific topic. Can’t do that without entering an email address.

(Joshua Rosenfeld) #22

Discourse relies quite heavily on email. Email is used for password reset and to verify account ownership status, amongst other less critical (but very useful) features like notifications. Can you expand upon inviting users without knowing their email? How will they know you invited them?

(Steve Combs) #23

One need is migrating a group like meetup, FB, or listserv. Would be nice to publish/send a link that onboards the user and adds them to group like bulk invites (sans email). They would still have to provide an email to activate.

(Nico) #24

Exactly. Users could generate invite links which are valid once (or maybe even have a max number of possible invitees allowing them to be reused). Anyone who clicks this link would still have to enter an email address plus username and password to register.

We could still do notifications like “User XY registered using your invite link”.

(Joshua Rosenfeld) #25

Ah, you need them to be added to a group. This is certainly an interesting idea.

This is a concern I have with this. While this proposed feature would work well on sites where public registration is enabled, “open-ended” invite links would be a huge security hole for invite only sites.