Using Lithium to power social features on a site

[FRosario]

Hello all,

I'm currently evaluating Lithium as a solution to implement social features, such as friends, activity feeds, leaderboards, etc. on a client's site. I've been digging through documentation, but could still use some guidance. Has anyone here tried something similar and have some advice?

One question in particular I have is around creating and administering groups. I'm thinking about implementing a user's group of friends by creating a new group for each user, then adding their friends to that group. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to add a user to a group programmatically without user action being required. Instead, it looks like you need to use the /invite endpoint, which requires the user to opt in to be added to the group through a message, which is no good for us.

Any constructive input is appreciated.

Thanks,

Frank

[nathan]

As far as I know, there is no way to programmatically add a user to a group without them accepting an invite. Someone from Lithium should be able to confirm this.

You can however retrieve a list of a user's friends. Depending on what you want to achieve, this might provide a work around as you could, as an example, allow a user's friends to post to a certain board.

[sharakarasic]

I would like this feature too! I work for a healthcare learning company, and we have a need to create many private groups for our partners and clients, and we need to populate the group members without having to email invite every user.

[JulieH]

@FRosario  If you haven't done so yet, I would suggest requesting a demo to discuss your specific requirements and get more in depth information regarding your use case.

Perhaps this will help @sharakarasic :

You can add a member to a group without having to go through the process of inviting them, and then having them accept the invite. Just keep in mind this wont trigger a notification that they have been added to the group, so you'll need to communicate that seperately. 

When navigating to the groups admin, select the Members tab. From there you can add members individually by username, or if you've already given them a specific role, you can batch add all of them by selecting the appropriate role in the drop down list and clicking Add Members by Community Role.

Hope this helps!