All posts in the topic Being Invited to Join a Group (Short link)
Summary
- There are 7 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael JasonSmith at Feb 07 02:09 UTC
| From | File | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Michael JasonSmith | admin_join.pdf | Feb 07 01:06 UTC |
A slight change to how things work now: the user has to confirm that he or she
wants to join a group.
Being Invited to Join a Group.
A group administrator can invite you to join a group. If you receive
an invitation email message you can join the group by carrying out
one of the two following steps.
* Click on the Join link in the email message. You will be presented
with a confirmation page. Click the Join button to join the group.
You will be presented with the homepage of the group.
* Reply to the message, making no alterations to the message — other
than those automatically carried out by your email client. You will
receive an email message, confirming that you have joined the
group.
Requesting an invitation becomes quite simple now:
* Click on request,
* Fill out the form which asks why you want to join the group, and
* Wait for the above message to come in ☺
Why not allow/encourage new and existing members to invite others to join
public groups?
There would need to be a limit on the number of invites.
I'd add a link to this feature at the very end of the joing process ... Now
that you've joined, invite a friend you know/think would be interested to join
you.
I have no problems allowing all users to invite others to join a group, within
limits. The page for doing so would look really similar to the Request
Membership page. I will keep it in mind when I do the page mock-ups.
I would not add a feature to joining: I want to *make* *it* *simpler* not
harder ☺
On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 16:54 +1200, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> I have no problems allowing all users to invite others to join a group,
> within limits. The page for doing so would look really similar to the
> Request Membership page. I will keep it in mind when I do the page
> mock-ups.
>
> I would not add a feature to joining: I want to *make* *it* *simpler*
> not harder ☺
Well ... the process of joining itself wouldn't actually be any harder,
since the user would be joined before they were asked.
*HOWEVER* ... it does feel like the wrong time. When you join a group,
how are you going to know you want all your friends to join it too,
unless you've actually received some email from it.
The Invite Friends page does make the process harder if we show it to the user before the group; whatever the technical aspects are,¹ I believe that a user will consider the group "joined" when he or she can access it as a full member, and the nag-page gets in the way of that. An Invite facility exists for two reasons. For a public group that allows anyone to join, the invitation step allows the invited user to skip the email verification step of registration http://groupserver.org/r/topic/7ojOA069zPQquIRZrWzpmR As we know that the user has control of the address (he or she received the invitation). For a private² or secret³ group, an invitation will allow the user to join *at* *all*. 1. Under the new system, the user has joined a public group as soon as his or her email address has been verified. This occurs just before the password is set http://groupserver.org/r/topic/7ojOA069zPQquIRZrWzpmR 2. A private group is one where a user can see that the group exists, but not the posts, even when he or she is not logged in. To see the posts, the user must be a member of the private group. 3. A secret group is one where a user *must* be a logged in member of the group to see the existence of the group and its posts.
As we now require email addresses, rather than members, to be verified, the
scheme for adding new members changes a bit. While I am making a change to the
work-flow, I am also proposing a few changes to protect the privacy of people,
and hopefully get past spam-filters. Below is the sate-transition diagram for
an administrator creating a new group member, and inviting that member to join
a group. (I know that allowing anyone to invite other members to join a group
is a feature that many would like to see, but lets convert existing features
over first ☺)
The first step is to create a new user. The page for doing this would look very
similar to the existing Edit Profile page, except for
* An entry for the email address at the top, and
* An entry for a message to go to the new member.
The idea of the message is that it will add some text that will (hopefully)
make the invitation look less like spam.
Once the new member is created, an email message is sent out to that member.
The message will contain two links: one to accept the invitation, and one to
reject the invitation. If the user accepts, the email address is verified, and
the new member is taken to his or her new group.
If the new member *rejects* the message, then the user-instance in Zope is
deleted, and a message is sent to the support group logging the fact that an
administrator tried to add someone who did not want to belong to the group. In
the big scheme of things, the administrator invaded the person's privacy, which
is a Bad Thing. Hopefully the site administrators can step in and sort out the
errant group administrator if the membership-rejection is logged with the
support group for the site.
The following file was added to this topic.
- Name: admin_join.pdf
- Type: application/pdf
- Size: 186.89KB
By the way, the From address for the invitation-email will be first preferred
email address of the administrator that created the member's profile. The
Reply-to will be for the script that processes the join-group invitation ☺
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