Users incorrectly getting group membership upon joining: A discussion on a Discourse forum regarding an issue where users are being automatically added to a group when invited to a topic by an admin, despite the admins not selecting the group membership option.
jtbayly reported the issue, stating that it has happened at least twice with admins inviting users to a conversation without specifying group membership. jomaxro suggested checking the email domain option within group settings and the category security, but neither of these explanations seemed to fit.
jtbayly clarified that the invites were sent from the button at the bottom of a topic, and jomaxro asked about the category security, which was set to allow everyone to reply/see, but only group members could Create/Reply/See.
jomaxro confirmed that the invite feature is limited to TL2 level and above, which explained why jtbayly’s test account couldn’t see the invite button.
jtbayly reported that the issue didn’t happen consistently, but it did recur, and jomaxro was unable to reproduce the issue.
Falco suggested that the issue might be related to an outdated version of the software, and jtbayly confirmed that their version was about a month old. After updating to the latest version, jtbayly was unable to reproduce the issue, suggesting that it may have been fixed in the latest update.
At least twice we’ve had members join upon invitation from admins without specifying that the invite includes a group membership, only to have them gain the membership immediately upon signing up. Is there some setting I’m not aware of that could be playing into this behavior?
Thanks in advance.
From the button at the bottom of a topic.
We aren’t using that email setting.
Not sure what to say. We’ve successfully bulk invited people and added them to the necessary groups. These were just a couple of one-off invites to particular conversations we thought somebody would be interested in. Both of us who did the invites are admins but didn’t select to add the person to any groups.
Is the topic you’re inviting the users to in an open category, or does the category have security on it?
everyone can reply/see
only the group members can Create / Reply / See
Hmm…I don’t think we auto-invite based on category security, but let me test quick.
Related question. I logged in with a test account and I don’t see the invite button. Is that limited to admins?
Invite is a TL2 level feature, so new users don’t have access to it.
That’s not it - my invited user was not added to a the group with create permissions.
I’m out of ideas, we’ll see if anyone else has suggestions…
FWIW, I’ve not had it happen consistently. First time I passed it off as a fluke. Second time (at least it being noticed) was another admin. I don’t believe in coincidences, ie the same fluke happening twice, so I thought I better report it.
Just had it happen again. An admin used the invite button at the bottom of a topic.
Is it possible the order of the permissions matters?
I’ve been trying to repro this, no luck so far. Let me make sure I’m mirroring your config as closely as I can:
This category is reply/see to everyone, and create/reply/see to a single group (let’s call it foo)? Group foo is closed, you must be added by an admin or group owner? Users invited to the topic by admins are (sometimes) ending up in group foo?
Is all that correct?
Are you running latest? If I remember correctly we changed behavior around this recently.
No we aren’t. About a month old. Any idea when the change might have been?
I just updated our staging site and I’ll try to repro it there.
Edited to add: I just found the group log, and it says that the person was added by “system.”
Please do, it should be fixed in latest.
So far attempts to reproduce on latest have failed. My apologies to both of you for taking up your time.
