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. 😀
Matthew Bartlett Sun 6 May 2018 8:10AM
This particular discussion (af6U4b3K) has had probably ~8 people participating in it over the last 10 months, and 12 have seen it; but only the two of us who have participated in it since the new feature went live are listed as 'thread members'. Intended behaviour?
Robert Guthrie Sun 6 May 2018 9:54AM
Arrrr yes, sorry about that. We have not back-filled the memberships for a thread yet. Right now you get a thread membership when you participate or are added/invited to it. We need to go back and add people who have already participated.
Matthew Cropp Sun 6 May 2018 11:12PM
I've noticed this in a bunch of threads that have had a lot of participation previously. @robertguthrie, will y'all be fixing from the back-end, or should groups be taking pro-active steps to "re-add" people?
James Kiesel Sun 6 May 2018 11:15PM
We will back-fill it, but it will take a little bit of time, since there's been lots of discussions on Loomio in the past :)
Richard D. Bartlett Mon 7 May 2018 5:57AM
@gdpelican I would recommend writing a script rather than doing it manually. :facepalm:
James Kiesel Mon 7 May 2018 6:21AM
Er, I wrote a script earlier today, and am now downloading database to test it on. This should be complete within the next few days.
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of discussions here; this isn't something that we're doing, or ever considered doing, manually.
Hugi Ásgeirsson Mon 7 May 2018 12:45PM
@gdpelican once this feature is pushed to the stable branch, could you make that script available?
Robert Guthrie Mon 7 May 2018 12:55PM
I wonder if Rich was making a joke that ended up as a clanger on the floor.
@hugi As a policy we always include data conversion stuff like this in the rails migrations by the time this hits the stable branch, so this stuff is automatic for docker users who run the migrations after pulling the latest image.
Hugi Ásgeirsson Tue 15 May 2018 12:48AM
@robertguthrie and @gdpelican – I saw that the stable branch seems to have been removed? I've now started tracking master, and have this update among others, but I've got the same behaviour as @matthewbartlett describes above. What steps do I need to follow to back-fill memberships to threads?
Robert Guthrie · Sun 6 May 2018 12:07AM
Yea, i agree. I've added a PR for a "Don't notify" button as an alternative action on the action bar. It also fixes the translation.
As you can see in this thread, the first batch of UX issues were around people thinking that clicking the "done" button ment they had sent notifications. I think having a disabled Send button is important to get the right message across.