Post in Group Invitations

Jun 26 21:51 UTC

Thanks for your comments, Steve. I am encourage to see that we are all
on the same page ☺ We have been thinking of the mechanism for preventing
people for being bombarded with invitations, as this is a privacy
breach. (Technically it is an invasion of privacy — but arguing privacy
semantics is dull at the best of times!) Exactly how the restrictions
will be presented is not something that I am very clear on, so I could
do with some guidance on that.

The way invitations-table is recording the invitation is with the
following fields:
      * invitation_id
      * user_id
      * inviting_user_id
      * site_id
      * group_id
      * invitation_date
      * response_date
      * accepted
When the invitation is sent out, we will write the first six fields.
When a user responds to the invitation we will write out the last two
fields: the date of the response, and if the user accepted the response
or not. This scheme allows us to restrict
      * How many invitations a user can have
      * How many invitations an administrator can send,
      * How many invitations for a group can be sent out
      * How many invitations for a *site* can be sent
      * How long before an invitation can be re-sent if a user has not
        responded
      * How long before an invitation can be re-sent if the user has
        declined.
By never deleting the invitations, I can implement all these
restrictions. In addition, I can also present a log of all invitations:
pending and past. (The log is what I am working on now.)

What the actual restrictions should be is something I will leave to the
configuration options. As you say, Steve, sites like the forums on
e-democracy.org will have quite different requirements to
OnlineGroups.Net.

The user not responding to an invitation does not tell you why the user
has not responded. We will need to work the bounce-detection into the
invitation subsystem to be able to give you any meaningful data.