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Discussion: Invites and Private Sites - not workingReported This is a featured thread This thread was locked for the following reason: (none given).

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jeremy_wetpaint
jeremy_wetpaint
Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 21 2009, 1:40 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 21 2009, 2:16 PM EDT
Users are not able to join a private site by invitation at this time. The solution is to change your site permissions so that it is not private and invited members will then be able to join. Once the members have joined you can change the site back to private.

How to change site permissions settings - http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/Site+Permissions+Settings 5  out of 15 found this valuable. Do you?    
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keishamckenzie
1. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 12:09 AM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 12:09 AM EDT
Thanks for your post, cause a lot of my students have been complaining and I was thinking that they were not following the procedures correctly. I then realised what they were facing when I actually asked a student for her username and password and saw the dilemna.. I have since followed your advice and it is now working.

I really hope that this issue is resolved soon as it is very frustrating and we need privacy at all times.

Thanks again. 4  out of 6 found this valuable. Do you?    

gheeghee
2. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 6:40 AM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 6:40 AM EDT
Turning our private sites public is not a solution since it defeats the purpose of having the site totally private in the first place. Some information on the site are meant for staff only. Otherwise we would have opted for invite sites, instead of private sites. We really hope the issue can be resolved ASAP, or at the very least go back to the previous setup before the upgrade, which all of us were happy with since we can issue invites, see who we have invited and set the level of user rights at the point of sending out the invites. Thank you for your attention. 18  out of 20 found this valuable. Do you?    

Posted Anonymously
3. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 2:55 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 2:55 PM EDT
Yes plesae it's a lame fix - going public is not an option for us as we are a group of MP's who save our expence clams here on wetpaint.

come on it's only a bit of code! 7  out of 9 found this valuable. Do you?    
Baby_Apple
Baby_Apple
4. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 4:01 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 4:02 PM EDT
If you read Jeremy's entire post, you will see that it is possible to change your wiki's permissions back to private, after everyone you need has joined.

Follow the instructions given on this page:
http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/site+permissions+settings 2  out of 6 found this valuable. Do you?    
walrusworldstudios
walrusworldstudios
5. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 4:02 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 4:02 PM EDT
The invite feature for Wetpaint was removed for various reasons. First off, I have have you know it is not "a bit more coding", it is a ton of coding to make the invite system for private sites. So, saying "it is a bit more coding" is a completely false statement.

Also, changing the permissions for a few minutes is not a big deal. Sorry if I sound rude, but it isn't a big deal. A very easy fix to having your students come on the site is during class, make the site un-private, and have all of your students join the site. Then, you can make the site private again. If anyone who is not a student of yours joins the site, you can easily ban them.

I am not a big fan of the removal of invites to private sites, but, there are many ways around this. I have already given you one solution, and you guys are smart people, so I am sure you can figure it out. I do not think making your site public for a few minutes will cause that much damage. I hope you take this into consideration.

~Walrusworldstudios
Wetpaint Central Community Moderator 2  out of 15 found this valuable. Do you?    

gheeghee
6. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 4:27 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 4:27 PM EDT
It is a problem for us to turn site public, because our staff work across multiple time-zones and geographic locations, in case you are not aware. There is no way the site admin can tell when the staff will log in nor is it feasible for the poor guys to stay up all day/night to turn the site private/public /private again as and when staff log in. I would like to know whether it is possible to go back to the previous setup? Even for selective sites? 7  out of 10 found this valuable. Do you?    
Baby_Apple
Baby_Apple
7. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 4:49 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 4:49 PM EDT
You won't need to make the wiki private whenever someone signs in, only when they join. I suggest you set up a day where every staff member joins. After they are all members, you can restore your wiki to its private permissions, and you will never need to open it up again unless a new staff member needs to join. 1  out of 4 found this valuable. Do you?    
jeremy_wetpaint
jeremy_wetpaint
8. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 5:44 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 6:08 PM EDT
I've talked to our team about this issue and it is unlikely that support for invitations on private sites will be returned. It's looking like the option to send invites from private sites will be completely removed in the near future. There are a few reasons for this:

First, there have been ongoing problems with users being able to successfully join sites using an invitation that was sent to them. With the last release we decided to simplify things. The old system required a lot of functionality to pass roles and permissions through with them, and verify that the user clicking through was the user who was invited. Now invitations are basically just links back to the site. This allowed us to re-build the login system in the simplest way possible.

For the majority of users on Wetpaint, the process of joining and signing in to a site is much simpler, and we think this is a good thing. We recognize that this was at the expense of convenience for private site users, and we’re bummed about that, but it has a broader benefit for users of our network of sites.

Another reason that Wetpaint has disabled support for invitations on private sites is that supporting private site features vastly increases the workload when it comes to QA testing new features that are in development.

Last, but certainly not least, is the fact that private sites are extremely difficult to monetize because advertisers don't want to waste their money on sites when they can't tell what kind of content or activity is on them. Granted, this does not apply to ad-free sites, but those are only a tiny percentage of sites on the Wetpaint network.
 5  out of 15 found this valuable. Do you?    

Posted Anonymously
9. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 5:59 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 5:59 PM EDT
Ok, but can we have this information displayed somewhere more prominent? I've just wasted an hour of my time and the time of the private site owner trying to figure out why I couldn't sign up - he wasn't even aware that invites had stopped working for private sites.

Also, sounds like your users want to be able to accept invites to private sites, but you're disabling the feature for reasons that are largely technical. Expect to lose some users. 6  out of 8 found this valuable. Do you?    
chrisco97
chrisco97
10. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 6:25 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 22 2009, 6:25 PM EDT
I think the sign-in feature was worth taking away the invataions. I no it is bummer for those who have private sites. But I do agree with Jeremy on the fact that there is more pulic sites than private. So they try to add more features for the public sites than the private sites

And I don't expect that they will lose to many users. 2  out of 14 found this valuable. Do you?    

ViolinSensei
11. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 22 2009, 8:27 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 30 2009, 4:44 PM EDT
Thank you for being more forthcoming with information. I have some way to explain this to my students that they find credible and honest.
I know a really smart IT guy that could fix this for you. But of course he is kind of expensive. But he does free lance.
Meanwhile I have to go with what my students vote on.
I will ask them what they think of online open house day. 0  out of 2 found this valuable. Do you?    
jennyt2
jennyt2
12. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 4:16 AM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 4:16 AM EDT
Well guys i gave the new system a go today. i made the site public, gave the adress to my class and gave them 10 minutes to sign up. only 3 students could not sign up successfully. I then turned the site back to private. It did mean i didn't have to invite everyone individually, which did save time. I did forget to give them writers permissons which will mean i will have to do it manually but I will be more on the ball with the next class. So all in all it wasn't that bad. Now we just need to be able to remove users whe we change class groups. Somethng to work on. So chin up private site moderators it is workable. I do miss the ability to line up usernames with guests so maybe that is still in the pipeline. 0  out of 8 found this valuable. Do you?    

aymanfadel
13. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 11:26 AM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 11:26 AM EDT
wetpaint could have sent an e-mail telling administrators of private sites about the change.

would you consider creating a feature which would allow private wiki site administrators to add existing wetpaint wiki users (by user name rather than an e-mail invite) to the members of the private wiki? Obviously there would need to be some acceptance of the invitation before the wetpaint user would become a member.
 4  out of 5 found this valuable. Do you?    
chrisco97
chrisco97
14. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 11:51 AM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 11:51 AM EDT
All you would have to do is make you site public, let the people join, then make the site private again. 2  out of 10 found this valuable. Do you?    

bonarioj
15. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 5:06 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 5:06 PM EDT
Just ran into this issue today and also wasted over an hour trying to get a user signed in.

The lack of warning and communication about this to private site owners is the first problem. Even a posting on the Wetpaint Blog would have been nice, for example. Of course, this fits the saying that you get what you pay for. I hope paying private site owners got some warning at least.

Frankly, the workaround is poor and the rationale is poor. This leads me to believe the reason is not truly technical, but as usual, it's about money. If not, I find it hard to believe that is/was too difficult to create a way for site administrators (or moderators) to manually add someone to the private site (add a wetpaint user name to the list of members, and the next time the user logs into wetpaint they have to confirm they want to join the site). Currently, having NO other option than to make a site public, even temporarily, is a poor decision from a customer service perspective even if it makes some business or technical sense to WetPaint.

Well, from our end of things we're now starting to discuss moving to a different hosting site, despite how much we like WetPaint. 10  out of 13 found this valuable. Do you?    
chrisco97
chrisco97
16. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 5:10 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 5:10 PM EDT
"Just ran into this issue today and also wasted over an hour trying to get a user signed in.

The lack of warning and communication about this to private site owners is the first problem. Even a posting on the Wetpaint Blog would have been nice, for example. Of course, this fits the saying that you get what you pay for. I hope paying private site owners got some warning at least.

Frankly, the workaround is poor and the rationale is poor. This leads me to believe the reason is not truly technical, but as usual, it's about money. If not, I find it hard to believe that is/was too difficult to create a way for site administrators (or moderators) to manually add someone to the private site (add a wetpaint user name to the list of members, and the next time the user logs into wetpaint they have to confirm they want to join the site). Currently, having NO other option than to make a site public, even temporarily, is a poor decision from a customer service perspective even if it makes some business or technical sense to WetPaint.

Well, from our end of things we're now starting to discuss moving to a different hosting site, despite how much we like WetPaint."
I know they could have e-mailed everybody about this update, but you don't understand how much Wetpaint has to do. And how hard it is to keep some of the features up. You know, they only have about 50 employees. 1  out of 8 found this valuable. Do you?    

Posted Anonymously
17. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 6:09 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 6:09 PM EDT
"I know they could have e-mailed everybody about this update, but you don't understand how much Wetpaint has to do. And how hard it is to keep some of the features up. You know, they only have about 50 employees."
And not one of those 50 people could have taken 5 minutes to compose and post a blog message (or statement on WetPaint Central) to say:

"Beginning tomorrow, the ability to send invitations to join Private Sites will be turned off."

Well, at least at first glance it's looking like Google Sites has enough similar functionality to what we needed from Wet Paint, including the ability to send invitations to join a private site... 7  out of 9 found this valuable. Do you?    
chrisco97
chrisco97
18. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 6:16 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 6:16 PM EDT
I know they could have, and I don't know why didn't. But they have posted it on the homepage now, so everybody should know before to long. 1  out of 4 found this valuable. Do you?    
SuperSpaz
SuperSpaz
19. RE: Invites and Private Sites - not working
Sep 23 2009, 6:27 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 23 2009, 6:27 PM EDT
It is a main thing. Wetpaint has been having tons of probloms that they are fixing! 1  out of 3 found this valuable. Do you?    
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