Email invites to Group Hubs: Anyone successful with using this feature?

[mhock]

Hello Everyone,

I know this is a new feature in 22.4 however we are struggling to even access it. We walked through the documentation to ask Support to turn this on for stage and production back on 5/4/2022.

We see in Admin we have the right selections but we still do not see the invite line. From another discussion, it looks like @tyw and @StanGromer are using this feature for Events. Have you started using it with Group Hubs?

We have a time sensitive launch that needs this functionality. I am hoping this is something that WE are missing and not just a 'wait for support' situation.

Thanks in advance.

[allensmith81]

We tested it on stage and it worked, we haven't yet deployed 22.4 to Prod so don't know about in the real world.

When support turned this feature on we automatically had the option to invite members by email. When went put an email address in it was delivered and the user was able to register then join the Group Hub.

I would love to get you screenshots but our stage server is having issues at the moment and I am currently unable to access it. 

[tyw]

Support had to enable this for us once Stage was updated to 22.3.

I just finished writing supporting docs for our Group Owners and pending a Stage > Production update that includes some guidance in the Group Hub Invitation email template we're hoping to let stakeholders use it by Friday. 

Has support confirmed its been enabled?

If not, escalate the ticket if its time sensitive and tag your CSM? 

I could be way off here too but do you have a custom UI? If support enabled it but the email invite field is missing you may need to update your UI? In our site once it was enabled the modal when issuing invites updated automagically to include the email invite field. 

[StanGromer]

I missed it until I reread release notes but they say you have to open a support ticket to enable this (which seems like a waste of all of our time, why they don’t just enable new features makes no sense). 

edit - Otherwise I don’t get it until end of this week. Hoping you all have these bugs worked out by then as we similarly are ready to use it the day we get it 🥳

[StanGromer]

I was able to test this in our staging today, and it seemed to all work as expected - Got test emails to my personal gmail when sent out. 🤞 it works sending out emails in bulk when we try start of next week!

[tyw]

Quick update on current state.... 

We use SSO in our community so there are three flows that could be at play: 

1. Recipient is a member of the community already
   
   • Perfect! Open email, click Join link, sign in, and you're added. 
     
     
2. Recipient is a member of company, but not community 
   
   • Perfect! Open email, click Join link, sign into Community using company account, set a username, and you're added.
     
     
3. Recipient is not a member of company, or community
   • In order to create a company account you must verify your email address which understandably breaks the flow.
     
     In our case, the recipient needs to be advised to create a company account and verify their email. Once completed, open the email again, click on the Join link one more and sign into the Community, setting a username when prompted which adds them to the Group.

To ensure a good user experience we've edited the Group Hub invite template to include directions for folks in flow 3. We opt'd to do this over directing the user to a topic in the community with guidance since they may not remember that they need to go back to the email and click Join after creating a company account.

We had to do this due to the invitation modal 'text box' being plain text only which means everything lumps together, you can't have multiple lines of text so in order to communicate the steps for flow 3 we had to edit the template. 

Two things we're looking into as well: 

1. Opt-out, we need to make a process to ensure we don't send invites to people who've opt'd out of communications. This will likely be a manual process
2. Sent from, you can't change the Sent From address so we're building a process to ensure key stakeholders are informed so when recipients reply to the invite email requesting help we can swarm and support. 

[keckhoff]

@tyw I would love more info on how you're managing your templates for SSO users. We have the same use case it sounds like.

In particular, I'm very interested in hearing how you plan to handle these:

Two things we're looking into as well: 

1. Opt-out, we need to make a process to ensure we don't send invites to people who've opt'd out of communications. This will likely be a manual process
2. Sent from, you can't change the Sent From address so we're building a process to ensure key stakeholders are informed so when recipients reply to the invite email requesting help we can swarm and support. 

[Drew_C]

I'm struggling to understand why the Group Hub Invite email comes from the user who sent the invite, instead of from the regular community mailer name. It still comes from the community mailer email address configured in Admin. This is a deviation from any other emails I've seen go out.

My concern is that the email may be ignored or seen as some sort of spam/scam/phishing since the username name could be quite different the real name of the person who sent the invite.

[CarolineS]

We are currently struggling to get this set up due to our email configuration (on SendGrid with DMARC). It's too bad that Khoros' documentation didn't mention that this wasn't supported so we could have discussed options sooner (vs after a week of back and forth in a support case 😞 )

Here are details for anyone who's interested:

This issue is happening because of your Reject DMARC policy, SendGrid and DMARC configuration isn't supported. https://community.khoros.com/t5/Community-FAQ-s-from-Support/What-options-does-Khoros-provide-for-ma...

And if you want to keep using SendGrid with DMARC, then you will have to modify your DMARC policy to none. If you want to keep using DMARC, you'll need to switch to DKIM, which will require use a subdomain that also doesn't match your community subdomain, like community-noreply@mail.community.XXX.com. However, if you use DKIM, you won't be able to use Email Metrics, as mentioned in the above docs. 

[StanGromer]

@CarolineS Holy cow!  This is all a joke.

If it makes you feel any better, we've been waiting to send out invites to almost 100,000 users for various groups.  I've asked repeatedly that this new feature will support 10,000 users (everyone said yes).

It doesn't.  I think it's due to an existing bug where if you tried to PM anyone with more than ~1000 invites, it fails (It claims they got invited in the member management, but no actual invites go out).  Same exact problem with email.  Support literally responded to me that this is a known issue and will be fixed in 22.6.  How in the heck can it be a known issue if it literally just came out. 

The communication and quality of these releases is a joke, Khoros has become a literal joke in my company, and I look like an absolute **bleep** because I am the one who keeps introducing new, entirely broken, functionality.

[CarolineS]

UGGGG @StanGromer That STINKS. Really doesn't give me confidence in Khoros' testing. How could they claim it would support 10k users without actually testing it!? SO RIDICULOUS. 

[StanGromer]

They didn’t test it, it’s that simple. When you try to past more than 5000-6000 email addresses into the send box, your entire browser locks up and crashes. Sometimes after about ~10 minutes it’ll finally process. If anyone did truly test this and thought it was acceptable, you would think that too would have been included so we knew what to expect. Sigh. 

[CarolineS]

👎👎

[NarendraG]

Hi @CarolineS Looks like this is an issue with all the emails going through for this customer community, we do not have any separate or special configuration needed w.r.t Email delivery setup for this feature "Invite By Email for GroupHubs".

[StanGromer]

More problems - We built a script to get around the Khoros bug of not sending more than 1000 people.  22.4 now broke that, and/or it's poorly documented that if the Admin setting is set to "email", the API is also forced to send via email, and it does not send via PM. Even though the developer documentation makes absolutely zero mention of this.

Everything hurts.

[CarolineS]

@NarendraG Thank you for the response. It’s odd because I don’t think we have made any chances to our email configuration recently, and our configuration was given a thumbs-up by Khoros a while back when we set things up. But good to know there are no special email configurations required for this feature.

[CarolineS]

@StanGromer 😩😫😤

[tyw]

Khoros, it might be worthwhile to swarm since this feature clearly has interest and needs some attention. I strongly encourage a retrospective is done

We tried to get on the beta for this in December 2021 and were informed March 29th 2022 the beta was ready. It took nearly two weeks to coordinate the staging update needed.... 

Email Invites went GA in 22.4 on April 29th so this left little to no time to properly beta test. The biggest, most impactful piece of feedback I shared which yes, Im a broken record here but I don't care on the basis of first impressions matter was the lack of formatting support. Docs still haven't been updated 😞 

This however is a drop in the bucket compared to the 10k question or email issues Caroline has been encountering

[RahulHa]

@StanGromer Sorry for the challenges being faced with the Invites feature. We wanted to share that we are looking at these issues on high priority and on rolling out fixes, including any required Doc updates at the earliest.

* While 10K is indeed the limit for PM Invites, there was a defect that limited it to 1K. We have now fixed the issue and the fix will be available on the upcoming 22.6 release as well as back ported to 22.4.

* With email invites, we noticed an issue in some scenarios (based on the presence of community versus non-community members’ email addresses in the invitee list). This issue as well is now fixed and is currently in QA. This will be available in both 22.6 and 22.4.

@Drew_C, noted. We are looking into the issue and will follow it up to a closure.

Once again, sorry for the inconvenience caused due to the above issues. We acknowledge and appreciate your direct and candid feedback and will take steps to address the issues at the earliest.

@AshishKe @NarendraG 

[allensmith81]

@CarolineS 

I feel you we have a 'white label' community which means we are paying Khoros to remove the Khoros logo, however due to this issue we have had to use the Khoros email SendGrid setup rather than our company domain.

DKIM wasn't an option for us as our mail kept going to spam. We couldn't use our domain with Khoros's SendGrid as we are not allowed, for legal and compliance reasons, to have a DMARC of none on our domains.

I live in hope that Khoros will eventually come up with a better system.

@StanGromer We already have the limit on our Broadcast PMs set to 10,000 users which we use all the time and they are all sent an email (we have inserted tracking pixels in the PM to verify) - I have not tried to invite 10k users to a group hub via email though.

Have you tried to get your PM's to 10K to see if it will let you invite 10k users or is that what Khoros is saying is broken for you?

I wish, for anything that involves a PM or an email of say 100K users, that we could simply select 100k users and hit send. The system then create a batch job on the community backend that will work through the messages in batches until all are delivered, this wouldn't be technically hard to do.

[StanGromer]

@RahulHa Can you confirm the following since it’s apparently a big mystery:

Via the API, can we choose to send invites via PM, Email, or both? Does what the Admin setting is set to impact the use of the API for email invites specific to this?

Our problem remains we built a script that sends invites via PM. It now is sending all invites as email. We are not using the send email call though. Support tells me this is our fault, the documentation says otherwise. I can’t wait two months for someone to decide the answer to this?

[mhock]

I did want to give an update. We were able to successfully use this feature but ONLY when we limited the emails to less than 500. I suspected anything more wouldn't work well from 18 years in software.

My Sys Admin is working to make the default email not look completely suspicious. We had several partners not open the email and other report the messages were caught in spam. 

[AshishKe]

Hi @StanGromer ,
The Admin setting for Invitations controls the mode of invite (PM or emails) for the Community, and it applies to both the UI and the API. So if your admin setting is set to ‘Email’, the API invites will be sent via email. We are updating the documentation to make it clearer. Hope this clarifies.

[AshishKe]

@mhock Thanks for sharing the update. The issue with the default email having the actual inviter username instead of the regular community mailer name is fixed and will be available in the next release.