"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"

"Private wikis that are opened for a few minutes, or even a few hours won't be noticed. Since private wikis don't show up on google or any other search engines until at least a few days after they are made public, there is virtually no risk in the solution I laid out."

"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.
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"That will make it better for some. But I don't know how I could coordinate the lives of 25 people on different school, work, and life schedules to all get and respond to invites within one or even two days. And I really don't want to make their e-mail accounts vulnerable. It would kill the community openness and trust it has achieved.

If you can think of a solution for a shorter open window period, please post it here!"

"My group is a volunteer professional organization and we can't open our site AT ALL due to privacy issues, but sometimes we have new team members come in. We won't be able to use your site any more.

The decision to stop supporting private sites is completely up to your company, but it will open you up to more competition. You're missing out on a huge market of companies, professional organizations, and other groups who won't be able to use your site for secure internal collaboration. I encourage you to reconsider the long-term effects of this strategy.





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"Chris, I don't understand your comment. I have many private sites, and I see advertising on all of them if I use IE or Firefox without ADbloc Plus."