In a Discourse forum, suppose the setting Allow new registrations is disabled. I want to invite a user to a private group, however, that fails with the message “New account registrations not allowed at this time” even if the user already has an account on the site. I want to keep the allow new registrations setting disabled, while allowing invitation to any user with a forum account to a private group via a link. How can I do that? Manually adding invited users is not an option.

My research (with ChatGPT, Gemini and searching the web) shows that one way is to use invite-only mode while setting allow new registrations as enabled. However, this then results in us getting messages for every user asking for approval, which is a waste of time as only paid users can access the forums so the “invite” part is not useful. The problem with keeping invite-only mode disabled is that we did run into a case where a user was mass-creating accounts when allow new registrations was disabled so that won’t work either.

Note that we use SSO so users need to login to our main website, and then the system automatically creates an account on the forum if valid. As a result, keeping allow new registrations disabled normally works for us.

Many thanks in advance; if I missed a conversation, I would appreciate if you could point me to it.