Two different invitations
makermap has two, and they are not variations of one thing.
An organization invitation brings a person who already has an account into your organization. It is addressed to their email, it carries a role, and you send it from Team.
A signup invite brings a person into the product at all. It is a bearer code - whoever holds it can use it, and it is not tied to an email address. That is deliberate: an invite is something you hand over, and a code bound to an address cannot be forwarded to the person who actually wanted it.
This page is about the second one. You will only need it while the installation is invite-only.
Giving one away
Settings -> Invites shows the codes you hold, how many your quota allows, and what was counted to arrive at that number. Create one and you get something shaped like this:
MM-K4T2Q-9WBXF-1H0RD-VZ7NM
Pass it on however you like - it survives being read aloud, written down and retyped. The letters I, L and O are not in the alphabet at all, and a code typed with them is read as 1, 1 and 0, so mistaking a zero for an O does not cost anybody a code. Case does not matter and the hyphens are optional.
The person you gave it to enters it on the signup form, or opens a link with ?invite= in it, which fills the field for them.
Signing in with Google or GitHub needs one too
A provider button is a way of creating an account, so an invite-only installation asks for a code there as well. It asks after the trip to the provider rather than before it, because until the provider says who you are there is no way to tell a new account from somebody who already has one - and an invite wall must never stand in front of a person signing back in.
So a stranger with no code goes to Google, comes back, and lands on a page asking for a code. Enter it and you are sent through the provider once more; nothing was created in the meantime and nothing is stored while you type. Somebody who already has an account is not asked at all.
Settings -> Connected accounts shows every way you can sign in - your password counts as one - and connects or disconnects a provider. The last one cannot be disconnected: there is no password reset here, so an account with no key left is unreachable rather than inconvenient. Connect a second provider first, and the refusal says so.
The quota, and which invites come back
Your quota counts the invites you have created and not withdrawn. The two ways an invite leaves that count are not the same:
- Withdrawing an invite nobody used gives the slot straight back.
- An invite that brought somebody in is spent, and stays spent. Withdrawing it is refused, because it would not un-create their account - it would only let one person mint codes forever.
What the refusals mean
| You see | What happened |
|---|
INVITE_REQUIRED | This installation is invite-only and no code was given. |
INVITE_INVALID | The code is unknown, or it was withdrawn. Deliberately the same answer for both. |
INVITE_EXPIRED | The code was real and its validity ran out. Ask for another. |
INVITE_EXHAUSTED | It already brought in as many accounts as it was made for. |
SIGNUP_CLOSED | Nobody can register right now, with or without a code. |
Over MCP
get_my_invites returns your codes, their state and your quota. There is no tool that creates one: an invite brings a whole account into existence, which is a human act - the same class as registering an agent or resolving a decision.