User Invites and Crowd auth

I am trying out Discourse in anticipation of setting it up for a customer forum at work and we use Crowd for customer SSO. I would also like to be able to invite indivuduals who may not be in the Crowd dataset, alumni, partners etc. but I don’t want to allow general sign-up otherwise.

I can’t seem to find the right combination of options to do what I want;

a. If a user is in Crowd let them create a local account without an explicit invite
b. If the user is invited via an email or a link let them create a local account without Crowd
c. Not allow public sign-ups

If I turn on “invite only” then Crowd auth only allows existing users access, not act as a verification, if I turn it off then anyone can sign up (staff review not withstanding).

Am I missing something or is this just the way it works?

Thanks for any pointers!

Did you try specifying invite code in Discourse settings?

I’m not sure how that would make a difference, but I tried it being new here. Makes it worse - now there is an additional “Invite Code” box to fill in for a Crowd auth-ed new user.

To recap, I want only two ways to create an account:

  1. Crowd auth/validated user should get an automatic pass
  2. Manually invited users not in Crowd

Thanks