Spectrum: Invited users for private communities

[flaki]

Issue Type (check one)

• [ ] Bug Report
• [x] Feature Idea
• [ ] Technical Discussion
• [ ] Question (these will be auto-closed, please ask them on Spectrum instead https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/open)

Description (type any text below)

For larger private communities it could be useful to be able to have users joining "invite only", that is, they would be a member of a specific channel (or channels) they were invited in, but not any other channels, including any non-private channels (unless, again, specifically invited).

In the TechSpeakers community this would be useful for giving a kind of "transient" space for our new members who are currently being onboarded, but not full members until they finish their training. At the end of the training most (but not necessarily all) new members are transitioned into full "member" status: I would imagine these users start out as a collaborator members and could be "upgraded" by moderators to a full member status, in the same UI currently adding members to the team works today.

This would be super useful for us, but this kind of invite-only collaborator use case I have seen pop up in many other larger organizations in other use cases (e.g. short-time contractors or "invited experts" and similar).

The invitation I imagine could happen through the same mechanism that currently backs the private channel invite links, I would imagine non-members could be just added automatically as a "non-member collaborator" to the community, or if it's easier to implement that way, this could be a separate and specific link, different from the generic private channel join link for the group.

[mxstbr]

Interesting idea!

A quick v1 of this would probably be something like Slack's single-channel guests, would that work for your use case? Have a "newbies" channel that folks-in-training get invited to as single-channel guests, and then transition them to full members when they are ready?

[flaki]

Yep, this would cover our use case perfectly, I think that approach would make a great MVP feature for you to figure out if there are any other usecases this would need to be expanded to. :)

[mxstbr]

I cannot promise that this is something we will get around to soon, but will keep this in mind!

[mxstbr]

I just realised you do not even necessarily need to wait for us to make this happen, you can work around this by creating a private channel (full-members or something like that) and then only adding the full members to that private channel!

[flaki]

Yeah technically that workaround is possible for communities created from scratch, but for communities that have existed before this need arose that's not an option. Also this kind of "open-by-default" workaround would certainly raise some eyebrows at more privacy/NDA-conscious companies/communities.

This is just to say, I think the initial request is still valid and (considering it should be a relatively small change) still would be something worthwhile to see implemented. But thanks for the tip!