Contributors having a hard time accepting invite

Developer help
1

We have been inviting more contributors to our site but a few are having a hard time accepting the invite. They’ve tried to accept on Safari, chrome and firefox and just get a spinning dial. Is there a way to accept them onto the platform on their behalf?

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2

Hi @Lisa_Pereira, is your Ghost instance self-hosted or part of the Ghost paid plan? And I’m guessing this problem is only faced by some, not all, contributors?

Unfortunately, there’s no simply way to manually accept them on their behalf. Some workarounds you could try:

  1. Ask them to forward you their invite emails, then click on the link yourself and set up the profile as if you were them. You’d also have to choose a password at this point, so you could choose a random password, send it to them, and ask them to change it once they sign in. (Hopefully they won’t be caught by the spinning screen again).

  2. Alternatively, if your aim is just to have their profiles on the website (so they can be set as the author of a post, but don’t necessarily have to sign in) then there’s a more technical workaround. You basically create a special something.json file with the details of each user (full details in this forum post and included below for reference). This mimics the files generated by Ghost’s “Export data” function. Then, navigate through your Ghost Admin’s settings → Labs, say “Import data”, and choose the something.json file you created. Ghost will add the users and they can be set as article authors, but they will have to reset their passwords before they can sign in.

  3. The third option is the same as option (2), but after the import is complete you can ask the users to reset their passwords—which hopefully won’t get them stuck at that same “spinning dial” screen.

I’d suggest you try option 1 first, because it’s the easiest one to try if the authors are comfortable with you setting their passwords the first time round. If that doesn’t work, go for options 2 or 3 (depending on whether they need to be able to sign in or not) and let me know if you get stuck :slight_smile:

For reference, here’s the format of the .json file you need to create to “import” users:

{
  "data": {
    "posts": [],
    "tags": [],
    "posts_tags": [],
    "users": [
      {
        "id": 1,
        "slug": "person",
        "bio": "I am a person on the website",
        "website": "https://www.example.com",
        "created_at": "Thu, 3 Aug 2019 13:45:57 +0530",
        "created_by": 1,
        "email": "person@example.com",
        "name": "Some Person",
        "profile_image": ""
      }
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "exported_on": "Thu, 3 Aug 2019 13:46:48 +0530",
    "version": "2.14.0"
  }
}

Replace the slug, bio, website, email and name with preferred values for each person, and changed the created_at and exported_on time to match the current date and time. The format is pretty straightforward (the +0530 at the end indicates my timezone, which is 05 hours and 30 minutes ahead of UTC).