@anon6991706 just helped me identify an issue that I was not aware of.
I have been messaging new users to invite their friends, but it turns out it requires being a member at trust level 2. Quoting relevant section of the post linked above:
Trust Level 2 — Member
Members keep coming back to your community over a series of weeks; they have not only read, but actively participated long and consistently enough to be trusted with full citizenship.
Get to trust level 2 by…
- visiting at least 15 days, not sequentially
- casting at least 1 like
- receiving at least 1 like
- replying to at least 3 different topics
- entering at least 20 topics
- reading at least 100 posts
- spend a total of 60 minutes reading posts
Users at trust level 2 can…
- Use the “Invite others to this topic” button for one-click onboarding of new users to participate in topics
- Invite outside users to PMs making a group PM
- Daily like limit increased by 1.5×
I apologize for being ignorant of this limitation of being able to invite friends only after being upgraded to trust level 2. I am going ahead and upgrading several members who have been around long enough and have contributed along the way to level 2 to thank them for their time and contribution.
I also want to publicly thank @anon6991706 for pointing this out and have upgraded him to trust level 2 already as well.
If anyone else wants to invite their friends, please feel free to message me and I would be very happy to upgrade you to trust level 2 because you will be helping grow this community among us grad students. An alternative is to just share the link: https://discuss.cs.uchicago.edu with them and ask them to use the Sign Up button.