Allow group owners to invite users to a group they own in the initial invite

[awlogan (Andy Logan)]

I’ve been trying to find a way to simplify group adds for our beta test user groups. Right now it’s a bit of work for our product managers, they have to:

1. Send invites to customers to create a profile
2. Customers open the email link and complete a profile
3. PM monitors invites and see who accepted them
4. PMs add the people who accepted the invites to the Beta Group
5. PMs send an email / private message to the customer that they can now access the Beta Group

I know as an admin I can add groups to the invite per this post: Invite users to a group, but I don’t really want to make these guys admins just to save a couple of steps.

What would be ideal is if the group owner could add the group to the initial invite, but be limited to the groups they own. In this case they would only be allowed to select the Beta Tester group, and not my employee, staff, or other groups.

As a stretch goal it would be nice if the email or private message could also be sent automatically when the user signs up. This would take the process down from 5 steps to 2 steps.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Any ideas on improving this process @tgxworld or @sam? I know “participate in a beta” is one of the earliest uses we have of it…

[dax (Daniela)]

I’m in the same situation, and I think that add an Invite button only for owners so they can send invitations to other users to join the group is a good solution to start. Something like this:

[Krischan]

Would be cool indeed to be able to invite people as a group owner. This didn’t get implemented, right? Thanks!

[sjjh (Simon)]

Priority/Severity: normal(?)

Platform: all (I assume). Tested with Discourse 3.6.0-beta1-dev

Description:

There are two places to create an invite:

• main menu
• within a group page

As an admin or moderator I can create an invite within the group page. Opening the “link options“ within the pop-up dialog the respective group is pre-selected, thus invited people end up in the group directly. That’s great.

If I as a group owner and normal user (member of a group having rights to create invites) create a new invite on a group page the “link options“ part is missing the option to pre-select a group.

Expected behavior

As a group owner and normal user (having rights to create invites) creating an invite from a group page, the pop-up dialog shall contain the possibility to pre-select (a) group(s) and be prefilled with the respective group. The drop-down shall contain all groups the user has rights to create invites for.

Reproducible steps:

1. log in as admin
2. create invite from within a group page
3. observe, that within the “link options” a group-field is available, with the respective group being pre-selected
4. observe, that the invited user is added to the pre-selected group.
5. be happy
6. log in as a normal user (being a group owner and being member of a group having rights to create invites)
7. create invite from within a group page you are owner of
8. observe, that within the “link options” no group-field is available
9. observe, that the invited user is not added to any group.
10. be unhappy

Thanks for your work!

PS: It seemed, that this has worked four years ago.
PPS: There is also a feature request pending for this. But after thinking through this, for me it’s more a bug than a feature request as the button I’m talking about is within the group page (I’m not meaning the button in the main navigation) (plus the behavior for the button is intransparently different for moderators/admins).

[tobiaseigen]

Thanks, Simon! I moved your topic into a reply to the feature request because I agree with @sam it belongs here.

You’ve done a great job updating the issue raised in the OP here, given more recent changes to the invite system since this topic was created. The tl;dr is that admins are allowed to create invites whereby the invitee is added to one or more groups immediately as they create their accounts. Regular members who are group owners cannot.

It feels to me like it should be possible for site owners to grant access to the “Add to groups” pulldown when creating an invite, perhaps using a new allowed_by_group setting? If it’s allowed, then they can only select groups that they are owners of.

I can imagine use cases though when site owners might not want to allow it. If it is not allowed, then the invite button should not be shown on the group page for that member even if they are a group owner. Maybe removing it would be the right first move to make, so the UI is at least consistent.