if you have SSO enabled, or have disabled local logins, invites cannot be sent as they would bypass parent site authentication. Invites only work if SSO is not enabled and local logins are enabled.
So you want to invite users to your Discourse instance, but you have so many that sending invites individually would be a huge pain? Good news – you can send bulk invites! Here’s how:
Prepare CSV File
Prepare a CSV file with the users you want to invite. These points should be considered while preparing CSV file:
- One user per line.
- Email is required in the first column, and the email must be valid.
- Any permissions groups you want this user to be a member of should be in second column. For multiple groups, separate group names with a semicolon
group_1;group_2;group_3 - Normally invited users arrive at the homepage. If you would rather invited users end up on a specific topic, enter that Topic ID in the third column.
The format is:
name@example.com,group_1;group_2,topic_id
Note that group names and topic id are completely optional, only email is mandatory. You can have an invite that is just the email alone:
name@example.com
It’s easy to create CSV files in a spreadsheet, which would look like this:
Just be sure to save the file as CSV when you’re done.
Upload CSV File
Go to Invites page and upload the CSV file by clicking Bulk Invite from File button.
You should see a confirmation message once the file is uploaded.
Check Bulk Invite Progress Notification
Once the CSV file is processed, you will receive a private message notification with progress report.
The notification will summarize what happened with your bulk invites, including total counts of invites sent and not sent. Check your invites page on your user profile to see a list of the invites that were successfuly sent.
If there were errors reported, you can submit a new bulk invite file with the corrected lines.
Invites Sent
Each email address will receive an invite email:
username invited you to join
Community Title
A brief description of this community taken from the
site descriptionsetting.If you’re interested, click the link below:
http://discourse.example.com/invites/d377050add482483d24723f14eac4c45
Once clicking the confirmation link:
- their account will be immediately activated and associated with this email address
- they will be added to the specified groups (if specified)
- they will be directed to the topic ID (if specified)
If the invites are never clicked, they will expire naturally after 30 days.
Congratulations! That’s it, you’ve successfully sent out bulk invites.
Though I just did a test and will be able to send out individual invites directly to the topic, one at a time.