First of all, thank you for this wonderful product! It has a lot of cool features, and makes building a social networking website uber easy. You guys have done a great service to us! Thank ya'll!
The problem I'm having is with groups that are set to either 'Closed' or 'Secret'. I know an issue has already been brought up about making group invitations show up in a user's notifications, rather than being done through email. I think this would be a significant upgrade to encourage member engagement. I'm seeing another issue though that must be a bug however.
If you create a new group and set it to 'Secret', then send out member invites, the members are unable to access the group to join. Because the group is set to 'Secret' and the member has not joined yet, all they see is "ACCESS DENIED. THIS IS PRIVATE CONTENT." There's no actual button or link to join the group.
Am I missing something, or is this just the way it is right now? Because in order to add anyone to a secret group, the only thing I can think to do is temporarily set it to 'closed' so they can see the main page, and click on the join button, then set it back to 'secret' every time. I'm sure you can see how this is not the most user-friendly arrangement.
I have a few questions:
1) Am I missing something here? Is there a simpler way to deal with group invitations? Can you simply add and manage members somewhere in the Studio, similar to using the 'Accounts' App? That would be awesome.
2) If that's not available at this time, could we please see that presented in future releases of the software? My personal suggestion would be to make the 'Members' page of a group present more features, like displaying members who are not yet in the group, but who have been invited/requested to join, and giving admins the ability to automatically add them (similar to activating members in 'Accounts' App).
3) Is there a way to manage your site's groups and group members without an app? A way that isn't super-complicated? Is it relatively easy to go into a file or part of the database and add a particular member to a 'Secret' or 'Closed' group manually?
4) For a quick fix, could anyone please provide the code/instructions on how to add the "Join Group" button to the cover area of a 'Secret Group' main page (the page linked to in the group invitation email) that members can see once they've been invited? That way members will actually be able to join a secret group once the invitation has been sent, instead of just seeing the "ACCESS DENIED" message.
I'm not a programmer, but I am pretty computer savvy, at least on the user-end, and I find this system for closed and secret group invitations extremely hard to use. I'm sure that casual users will have even more trouble figuring it out. Would love to see a fix for this, even if it's just the simple solution of adding a button.
Once again, thank you for this fantastic software! It truly is awesome. I understand that bugs like this are just part of the process. I hope this feedback can help you and this community grow and improve in some way.
Thanks!