[OWW-Discuss] Invite someone to join OpenWetWare...

[Austin Che]

> 3. The person who invited the user currently isn't being sent. I think this
> may be important; I've added support for it but I have a few questions.
>
> A. Should people need to be logged in to send the message?
    
    Definitely. Avoid being a spam relay.
    
> B. Should the name of the member be included in the message?

    Yes. That's much more likely to get a response.
    
> C. Where should we put the button or label to send the invitation?
    
    Maybe on the how to join page.
    
> D. Should we record the invite and then send a message to the person who
> submitted the invitation when the invitee registers?

    That might be difficult to tell unless you have some unique cookie
    or something for them to accept the invitation. It would be easier
    to do the reverse and have a field on registration that has the
    inviter's user name. Even better, it should be possible to
    generate a link that when clicked, pre-fills out the registration
    form with various items (such as inviter's name, maybe the lab, etc.)
    
> E. Should we allow the person submitting the invitation to add an additional
> comment?
    
    Can't think of why not.
    
> F. Should we allow for sending invitations to more than one person? We can
> do a whole lab if we want; I'm current;y taking in just one name.
    
    They probably can just send it to a mailing list. 
    
> G. Should we offer to cc: the message sent out to the person sending the
> invitation?

    Sure why not.
    
> Recording the invitation isn't a lot more effort to implement and would make
> for a way to let users know we appreciate their efforts. It also gives us
> quantitative info on who's being invited and how often the inviation is
> acted upon.

    Might as well record it if possible.

    I think we need to implement a karma system. 'Worthless' numbers
    indicating the value of a member is surprisingly good at
    motivating people to do things in communities. We can do something
    like the weighted sum of:
    - number of invited people
    - total number of edits
    - number of articles created
    - number of emails sent to discuss mailing list
    - etc.
    
-- 
Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899