Invites

[SachaG]

Now that Telescope uses accounts-entry, I'm thinking about how to make it play nice with the invite system. The invite flow looks something like this:

1. Alice has an account, Bob doesn't.
2. Alice enters Bob's email and invites him.
3. Bob receives an email with a link to the site.
4. Bob signs up.

Right now we track all invited emails in an Invites collection, so step 4 can only happen if Bob uses the same email Alice entered. That's not great because it means Bob can't sign up via Twitter, Facebook, etc.

A better system would be generating a special token at step 2 and using that to invite Bob to sign up via a special URL (i.e. http://site.com/sign-up/a52s76hdia62z).

So my point is: maybe the token could be generated and handled by accounts-entry?

[rgoomar]

I would really like this system. It could be used in a classroom type situation. Where a teacher gives a sign up URL to students and they will then sign up using that URL and be enrolled under the class.

[rgoomar]

So, now thinking about it, this could be broken down into two different systems.

1. Direct Referrals / Invites
2. Organization Invites (More complicated)

I'm not entirely sure if organizational invites should be in this package or as a separate package in itself. Thoughts @SachaG @queso?

[SachaG]

What would be the difference exactly? I was thinking the package would provide a simple API to generate invite codes, and the app would be free to use them however it wants.

[rgoomar]

The difference I see there is that the first option gives a way to give invites to the application while the second is a way for users to invite someone to sign up and be apart of a certain group or organization. So, in the second scenario, there is possibility of adding fields. Like in the teacher example I put, it would be like this:

1. teacher invites students to join classroom
2. student goes through URL given by teacher
3. student is now enrolled in the class and there is a class field that is filled in automatically while registering the user (The field could be anything)

As opposed to this scenario:

1. User joins private website
2. User refers friend with invite code
3. Friend signs up

[SachaG]

I think for case 1 people could just add a callback to accounts_oncreateuser? I don't know, to me it seems a bit too specific a use case to be handled by the package.

[rgoomar]

Yeah, I agree with you. Thanks for the input. This token system could allow for people to create their own little referral / affiliate system out of it.