[kenrichman]

When setting up a site and enrolling people, can it be made easier to get them into the appropriate groups?
As a group owner I want to be able to look down the list of members and invite them to become members of my group without first having to send a friendship request and have it accepted. Far too slow. After all, they can always ignore my request. I presume things are done the way they are to stop people spamming every other user all of the time – but perhaps if I have the right privileges e.g. as admin, I could be trusted to do this. Any thoughts on whether this can be done?

[kenrichman]

Buddypress auto group join plug-in by Scott Hair is a help in getting members into the right groups initially, but I would still like to be able to skip the ‘become friends’ step before inviting people to my group(s).

[archonic]

Bump to the max! The friend component of BP is not appropriate for most of the sites I’ve made. This makes inviting users to groups impossible. It’s all the more confusing since BP asks who can invite people to the group when creating it, regardless of if the friend component is active or not.

In short – feature request for inviting any user (hopefully with a suggesting text-field) regardless of if they’re friends or not.

[girlbot]

I second that feature request archonic. The friend requirement is especially ridiculous when using buddypress as a LSM with Scholar Press.

[girlbot]

BP Group Management works well and adds people to groups without sending friend requests: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-group-management/

Invite Anyone is supposed to invite people via email and automatically place them in designated groups: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/