Currently there is no way how to force new community members to follow a community after they have been added to it. Only new community owners follow communities automatically.
This is a serious issue in scenarios that require new members to start following a community (project communities, formal top-down comunities etc.) Especially novice or external users often forget to click on the “follow this community” button and therefore become excluded from all updates unless they are @mentioned
Please add new settings “force new members to start following this community” to enable/disable auto-follow per community. This should be one-time action which switches on the follow feature when (and only when) a user is added to a community. The user shall be always able to intentionally stop following the community.
If you found such feature as too “dangerous” in hands of all community owners (risk of misuse), then you can limit it via a security role communities-admin or something similar.
This should work the same regardless the affected users are internal or external.
Second, please consider to create also a API call for this.
Third, it would be nice to provide community owners with information regarding which members follow the community. Perhaps it could be easily implemented via a new drop-down filter on the Community -> Members page.
This requirement came up many times, so we developed a tool which does help you administer these requests. Since I don't think that plugging solutions in here is "allowed", let me know if you are still interested in this function.
Andreas Ponte, Belsoft Collaboration
It's not a good solution to invite all external members as owners. Owners have more rights than members. I appreciate to invite external members, as members.
There is an API call to add Followers to a community. Was not documented at first, but should be soon. Check the API documentation for updates or ask Support or your CSM about it if interested.
+1!
That´s something I miss, too.
The tweak is a good workaround, but not enough.
There is a tweak for this. Owners follow automatically. Make new members an owner first and change them to member afterwards. Not a solution for sure.
I fully support to have the feature as described and look forward getting the API stuff and the ability for owners to identify the community followers too.