Limit membership of pods

Features and Ideas
1

I would love to run a pod, when it becomes a little less technically complex.

I would love to run a pod for me and people I know, and ideally I would allow my friends to invite their friends, but stop it there so it didn’t get too big. I’d therefore love a means of limiting membership in this way.

I wonder whether it would be possible (and considered desirable) to provide a scheme to podmins when they install their pod, so that they enter a number, perhaps as follows:

0 - unlimited (open) pod
1 - admin account only - single user
2 - admin account and people connected directly to that admin account (invite only)
3 - admin account, accounts directly connected to admin account, and accounts connected to those (invite only)
… and so on, although once you get up to 6 degrees of separation that is theoretically everyone in the world.

This would seem to be a useful way of limiting the size of pods.

Potentially, a podmin could later open up the membership scope, i.e. increase the number in the field, but not reduce it.

As a separate matter, I’d also love it if it were possible to have more than one root/admin account, as I’d like to run the pod with someone else, who would be my technical adviser. Under the scheme above, we could each invite friends and those friends, connected to one or other of our root accounts, could invite their friends. It may already be possible to have more than one root account, but I wanted to mention it as it’s part of my thinking about setting up a pod.

Hope this isn’t out of place, and hope it’s a useful suggestion and wouldn’t be too difficult to implement.

Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

2

Well we already have an invite system, you could set enable_registrations: false in the config and then set open: true and count: some-number to manage if people are allowed to invite users and how many invites total are given out.

I feel like if you want more users, just increase the invite count?

3

Yeah, I think this could be as simple as having a config setting to set a cap of the amount of registered users on a given pod. Once the cap is reached, registrations are automatically disabled by the system.

The cap can be increased at any time, we could just have the system check that there are less registered users than what the set user cap is.

4

It not sheer numbers, it’s about providing a pod for myself and my friends, to help them. I’d like them to also be able to invite their friends, but to limit it there, so that anyone on the pod is only one or two removes from me, i.e. a friend or a friend of a friend.

So not about setting an arbitrary limit on numbers (which wouldn’t prevent all sorts of random people at dozens of removes from me joining the pod, but when met would prevent me and my direct friends from inviting more people, unless I increased the number).

Not about limiting numbers per se, but about scope - making it a sort of community pod by only allowing me and those people with a direct connection to my account able to invite others.

5

I think that’s too complicated and our current systems flexibility is already good enough.

6

Maybe that would be a work around: We just set a number of max users and if the code base is good enough, we implement a moderation feature so you can give access to your Pod only for you friends and family. It should be shown on the register page, so if you want to register as a normal user you see if it’s possible.

7

@goob you can simply block registration and invitation and tell to your friend to ask you when they want to invite someone. It’s not something which happens everyday :wink:

8

I think the system described here is a little too complex and unnecessary. I think it would be relatively easy though to implement a config setting that only allows people invited by an admin to send additional invites, and then anybody who is invited from those accounts just have their number of available invites set to 0 when they sign up. I’ve implemented an invite system like this before for beta access to apps, and I think it would provide nice flexibility for podmins who don’t want a huge number of users. :slight_smile:

9

L3MNcakes, that would be fantastic - just what I would want. I was just trying to suggest something more flexible which would apply to more potential podmins who might want a case different from my own.

10

@Goob - Yeah, I definitely see where you were trying to go with this. I think if we could solve your particular use case first, then maybe it would be possible to expand on that to include broader use cases. :slight_smile:

11

Well, that sounds fantastic! I didn’t want to be greedy…

12

I want my pod to prevent signups by the general public, but still want to allow signups by selected friends and family. What would be the best way to achieve this? Thanks in advance.

13

@cunningdavid: As this discussion already shows, you can just disable registrations and use invites to still invite your friends and family.

14

Thank you, invitations solve the problem prefectly.

15

I’d still love a feature such as I proposed to be implemented one day!

16

Haha speaking as one who does not even have a pod membership I tend to agree with you.

Too many great things are ruined because they become top heavy and unwieldy. Its an old expression but is still relevant today - KISS.

I see the OP’s situation but sort of also feel the system already hasrobust tools to do pretty much what you want.