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.
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?
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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It’s probably worth looking at Discordapp.com for inspiration on this.
Namely:
- expiration
- management and revocation of links
- landing page that invites you to register
While they don’t have invite links that grant you a role, that’s a fairly obvious thing for Discourse to do, e.g. on the invite link settings page.
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Hi all, I’ve been lurking here for a while, and getting a lot of answers and useful information to how this forum works! Yay, and thank you!
On our forum, we generally discuss mastering a game that we play (GSN Tripeaks Solitaire is a great time filler, if anyone needs one LOL – oh, & it’s fun too!). We have clubs, and our mode of personal contact is through Facebook.
I can send invites to our forum by sending our forum URL via FB messages only. However, in our game, and in our lives, people like getting badges (and we love that badges are available!).
Our efforts to promote our forum would be enhanced if the person inviting would get credit when a someone joins. I have 80 people I can get credit for inviting if the forum didn’t require an email address. People are wary about giving out their email address to strangers these days… go figure (they still made me their friend). Out of the 80, 2 gave me their address 
I absolutely understand the need for email addresses in tracking, monitoring and recording membership… which can still be accomplished during the sign up process after the invite is received and accepted.
Just wondering if this is still on the table, or if I’m beating a dead horse.
Thank you so much for your time.