New feature: Invite people directly into a thread or decision
Robert Guthrie
Public
Seen by 93
We're happy to introduce some new features which we think you'll find super useful:
- You can now invite people directly into threads or polls (or proposals), without them joining your group.
- You have control over who gets notified when you create a thread or poll or outcome.
Now when you create a group, thread, proposal or outcome, you'll see an invitation screen like this (for a group):
or this (for a proposal):
This form lets you select exactly who to notify about (or invite to join) your newly created group, thread, poll or outcome.
An important change to note: unless you select people to notify, nobody will get an immediate notification - which may be what you want. People will still see the new activity in their "Yesterday on Loomio" email and within the app.
To make notifying specific groups of people easy, you can choose from predefined audiences, such as "everyone in the thread" or "people who have not voted". Alternatively, you can enter individuals by name or email address and they'll get an email that brings them into the thing in question so they can participate right away.
The other great thing about this feature is that you can invite people who are not members of your group directly into your discussions and decisions. They'll get an email allowing them to participate immediately, but they won't get access to the rest of your group. This is useful in cases where you need to invite an external expert into a specific discussion.
With this feature delivered, we're closer to being able to support private threads (person to person, without a group) - so expect to see that soon.
Of course, we'd love to hear what you think about this feature. Please leave feedback in this thread. Thanks for using Loomio. 馃榾
Robert Guthrie Fri 4 May 2018 12:36AM
Thanks Matthew, can you explain what makes you think the whole subgroup is a member of the discussion?
Matthew Bartlett Fri 4 May 2018 12:51AM
Because when I click ' Invite to thread' I see the attached modal, which makes it look like 'members if product development' are already part of this thread. Make sense?
Robert Guthrie Fri 4 May 2018 1:02AM
We're trying to offer a choice on this screen. You can choose to select members of Product Development, or enter individuals by name or email address.
Maybe we should add "0 people selected" on the empty state?
FABRICE ALCINDOR Fri 4 May 2018 8:17AM
Hi, This is a great feature! :clap:
I recently faced a case were I had to invite someone in my the group of administration of the association for internal discussion. Next time I will be able to just invite people for the discussion.
Question: If we invite a member in a discussion, will this member be automatically added to all related discussion and thread? Or shall we invite him for each one?
mike_hales Fri 4 May 2018 4:15PM
This new flexibility looks good, thanks team :clap: Seeing members of a thread is nice.
A couple of related Member-management things may be a bit broken. Group members' listing used to give a count of total members, no longer does; this was useful. Doesn't appear in the 'Manage members' pop-up either.
Tracking of invitations seems faulty - invited several people today who aren't appearing in the 'Invitations' panel on the group home page. Not appearing in the 'Manage members' pop-up either - but two older outstanding invitations are displayed.
PS: When group members' listing on group home page has been expanded, it would be good to be able collapse it again too.
Robert Guthrie Fri 4 May 2018 6:43PM
Hi Mike. Thanks for the feedback, very helpful.
To help get to the bottom of the invitation issue, could you please email [email protected] with the group url with missing invitations and the email addresses that you expected to be shown, but are not?
Thank you!
mike_hales Fri 4 May 2018 7:06PM
Done. Thanks Rob
Robert Guthrie Fri 4 May 2018 9:25PM
I've changed this form so the submit is disabled until you've added someone to the list. There is also a status message saying nobody added yet. Hope this clears things up. Feedback welcome of course!
Richard D. Bartlett Sat 5 May 2018 3:39AM
I edited an existing thread, then I get this form. The translation is missing. But more to the point, having a disabled form at this point is counter intuitive. Editing a context without notifying people seems to be a pretty common use case, so I'd expect there to be an obvious button like 'Don't send notifications'. Having to "X" out of this form makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong.
Matthew Bartlett 路 Fri 4 May 2018 12:24AM
Something I don't quite understand: this thread has a members panel, from which I can invite people. At the moment only Rob's happy face is listed, but when I go to invite it looks like the whole subgroup is a member of this discussion.