How member was referred to group

Good idea... basic marketing data collections.

A related question: In my main group, only I can invite guests, but I sometimes get a request to be invited and i can click on a review and approve link to let them join. This is convenient but how are they doing it? I would like to be able to tell a few a groups I below to that they can do that if they want to join and then I will approve them.

thanks,
Judy.

@Jonathan - why can't you add a required custom question that asks new members how they discovered your group? You could make it multiple choice (which will create a drop down) or short answer. I'm not sure how a member got into your group without answering the required question that you setup. Are you certain that the user wasn't in your group prior to your adding the question?

@Judith - Your group's membership option located in the Manager / Group Settings area of the dashboard must be set to "By Request Approval or Invitation." As a result, people who have not been invited to your group are able to request a membership. I have no idea how they are finding your group since there is no group directory yet (but its coming soon).

I guess I'm in the same boat as Judith and sorry if this is repetative. I have been having trouble recently with people joining my group that neither I nor the other two managers approved. Everyday someone else will have joined by an invite from another group member and we have no idea how they were approved. All members are allowed to invite, but the three managers should be able to approve and deny right? Or is the approval and denial of pending members determined by who invited them (ie - members inviting vs. managers inviting). Any help would be great!

Amy

@Clarence - I mentioned in my post above that apparently required custom questions are not enforced because someone got in without answering them. The user was a new member.

AMY -- I have mine set so that no one invite people to join but me so no one has been joining without my authorization and you should be able to set you site up the same way. I was just wondering where the non-members were clicking so that the system sends me their request to join... at that point I can approve or deny. Hope that helps,
Judy.

Clarence: I realize you can't know how they are finding my site, but when they do, my questions, what are they doing and what buttons are they pushing (since they can't log in as a non-member) to request my permission to join? thanks. i would like to tell some others were to go to do that... it is a ton quicker for me to approve requests than to type in all those e-mails to send invites. thanks, Judy.

@Judith - Your site has "limited" visibility, so they can still view the summary page. If they click anywhere else, the system brings them to the "Join" tab, since your site also is set up to allow membership by invitation or by request. So, at that point they sign up for CollectiveX, and the system sends you a membership request. If you want to be able to send them a link yourself, just send them your site address plus "/join". In your case, that's https://biz-events-listing.collectivex.com/join

@Amy - The issue is that in CollectiveX, an invitation is a ticket to join a group. Think of it as an "engraved invitation", so to speak. Approval is not required if you have an actual invitation. If you don't want this to happen, then turn off the public invite feature. In the future, we plan on expanding the public invite feature to allow you just have your members send a link to prospective members without them truly having an "invitation" to join.

I hope this makes sense.

I changed it to limited with just the summary of the group and kept the approve and deny and option. I guess I will also start sending just the link and not the invitation to ensure that I get to see everyone wanting to join.

Thanks for the help!
Amy

@Amy - changing it to limited doesn't change the public invite option though. The public invite option controls whether regular members of your group can invite members or not.

Go to the "Group Settings" sub-tab in the "Manager" tab. Look for the "Edit Permissions" section on the left side. The only one that is not grayed out (unless you are paying for the premium feature to control group permissions) is called "Allow ALL members of this group to: Invite new members into the group". You can also find this check box on the pending members subtab too.

If you uncheck that box, then regular members won't be able to invite new members anymore. They can still send them the link and since you have approve/deny setup you'll be able to approve/deny anyone who wants to join.

@Joe - There is a problem with the scenario you mentioned to Judith, and that is that unregistered users can view the summary page. Why is this a problem?

Because the only "page" that allows for free/custom editing is the Summary page. If I have special content or information that I only want my registered users to be able to see, I am forced to use the Summary page because no other page allows me to do it.

I think that we community owners should be able to determine to some extent what can/cant be seen based on the following user statuses and authorizations

USER STATUSES
==========
Un-registered/Unauthenticated
Authenticated but not Approved
Authenticated & Approved with some basic permissions definable

AUTHORIZATIONS
==========
URL level
Page/Tab level
Part level (a piece of a page wrapped with permission tags)

@Jonathan - Currently there are groups which rely on the suspended users feature working the way that it works currently. In fact, just last week I got a nice complement about it. They felt that it was a nice teaser for users and it made them envy all the commerce passing them by.

Make it configurable, however, would be doable. The level of complexity you're defining above, though, it probably a bit much for now.

I'm hoping that once we overhaul the group settings area, we'll finally have room for expressing more complex configuration options without overwhelming users. As long as it's something that doesn't make them feel like they have to open up a manual to understand what it does. (I borrowed that last phrase from Clarence. :-) )

Hey guys, with the latest release of our profile enhancements, including endorsements, you can now see who invited somebody in their profile, because it shows up as an endorsement.

Shortly, we'll be adding this feature to the manager area as well.

That is a sweet feature. We can really put this to good use in our group as it consists of local professionals. Those who know each other can endorse others and we can (as managers) get a much better idea of who knows who.

Good stuff Joe!

Thanks. :)

But I got to give credit to Clarence since these were all his idea.

The motivation here is that we want to offer users something better than "friends" because friends is basically a big racket. You get guilted into making somebody your friend, and then they can spam you, send you stuff you don't want, etc. Endorsing or giving "kudos" is a one-way, selfless act. You don't gain any power over the endorsee, but you can also specify that you only want to show your contact information to people you've endorsed. Later, we'll also allow you to pick from lists of people who have endorsed _you_ to send email blasts, etc.

Again, all of these ideas were initiated by Clarence, so I won't pretend like I thought it up.

At this point, I've been awake for over a day, and I'm still adding things to profiles. I'm about to hotlink parts of profiles (largely the social sections) for easy searching, etc.

This is an exciting time, though, so I don't mind. We've really made a giant leap in group engagement with these profiles. It's actually something that people _want_ to look at.

In the next day or two, I'm going to improve the site-wide search somewhat. I noticed that a lot of empty results come up, etc. It needs an overhaul.