Meta issue: Inviting and Contacting Users

Invitations to new users

Social media sites usually obtain members via invitations to new users from existing users. Any such system needs to have some form of hysteresis to avoid email spamming (multiple invitations could be combined into one, for example). In the case of the rating system, let’s consider invitation opportunities/reasons:

• provide access to a document or proposition from the rating system to a person along with an invitation to join. Facebook’s method to encourage joining is to allow “limited” access to information prior to becoming a user, with the enticement of access to more information as a reason to join.
• invite a source to join in order to confirm (or inquire about) information reported in the rating system. For organizations, we would want separate user accounts for each organization member, but link them to the organization. Organizations would likely want to specify particular members to confirm information reports.
• invite an acquaintance along with a reason to join (can have a preset list of reasons plus allow custom reasons to be specified): 1) join to discuss a particular document or thesis, 2) join as a domain expert (potentially offering to delegate voting power as an extra incentive to join), 3) in community rating systems, users send special invitations that vouch that the invitee meets community requirements. Depending on what the community’s requirements are, this could be the entire requirement to allow voting, or it might be a required step.

Another point that comes to mind is that users can potentially have two levels of access to a community rating system: access to the information vs voting ability. Or they could be granted voting ability right away, but not counted as a voter for statistics purposes until they cast their first vote. Statistics could also be based on how recently a voter has voted.

Sending existing users activity summaries

Social media site also send reminder emails to users about activity on the site that may be interesting to them, especially for users that haven’t directly accessed the system recently and therefore likely haven’t seen the latest information. In the rating system, this could include summaries of activity related to discussions, documents, or tags that users have expressed implicit or explicit interest in. Probably should allow user to change frequency of such reminders and conditions under which they are sent. Logged-in users should be able to go to a page to see the same type of activity summaries as provided in the emails.

User-to-user mentioning

We could allow users to “mention” each other in documents, etc (e.g. @dan ). These could show up as an internal notification list for each user, and in the case when user hasn’t recently logged in, could potentially be sent as an email to the user, assuming they’ve enabled this type of reminding. Probably need to allow a user to blacklist individual users if we support this feature to avoid abuse.

Source mentioning

Similar to user mentioning, but allow an email to be sent to a source that isn't a user.

This would require support for contact information associated with the source: #153. When contact info gets added for the first time, an email could also be generated with all mentions up to that point in time.

Another issue is we don't have a "user name" for non-user sources. We could use the descriptive name, but we would need the mention mechanism to allow for spaces, and we would need to make the descriptive name unique.