Only about half of students in chapter invited to workshop

[rdn32]

Description of the issue 📄

When I sent out invites to students in the Cambridge chapter for this month's workshop, the invitation logs show that 258 invites were sent, without any errors; but the number of students in the chapter is larger than that - at the time I think there would have been 507 students.

This is - or appears to be - a variation of #2542. Moreover, it is possible that what I saw happened before all the changes made to address that issue had been deployed.

The workshop number is 3695, and the invitations were sent in batch number 15. The invitation log gives these details:

• Status: completed
• Action: Invite
• Audience: Students
• Initiated by: Robin Newton (he/him)
• Started: April 08, 2026 20:34
• Completed: April 08, 2026 20:35
• Total invitees: 258

There is no indication that there were any failures: it looks very much like it tried to invite 258 students and succeeded.

There is the possibility that there was some criterion for being invited that the other students failed to meet. I haven't gone through the profile of every student who wasn't invited, but I did notice that the student ABMM who I mentioned in #2542 wasn't invited, and looking at her profile page there's no indication of anything being amiss. I would hope that if someone were, say, banned then (a) this would be apparent from their profile page, and (b) there would be some mechanism for appealing this if it looked like it was mistaken.

Screenshots 📷

Steps to fix 🛠

To do 📋

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• Fork and clone the repository
• Update the relevant files. Follow the steps to fix section in this issue.
• Commit your changes as one commit. Use the title of this issue as your commit message
• Submit a pull request
• Mention this issue in the PR description by including it's number
• Have your pull request reviewed & merged by a codebar team member

[mroderick]

Hi Robin, thank you for such a thorough description of the issue. It confirms what we suspected — this is an instance of an issue we've been working on.

What we found

I analysed the production database to understand what happened with workshop #3695 (Cambridge, 8 April 2026). The invitation logic uses a scope that filters out members who haven't accepted the Terms & Conditions:

• Total students in Cambridge's Students group: 509
• Students who haven't accepted the T&C: 249
• Students who have accepted the T&C: 260
• Actually invited: 258

The 249 students who didn't receive invites were silently filtered out by the accepted_toc scope. The invitation log showed 258 successful invites with no errors — there's no indication anything was wrong, which is why this is so confusing.

More details: #2576

We're working on it

The first step is making this data more visible. Organisers should be able to see how many students are eligible for invitation before sending invites. This is being addressed in PR #2578, which adds that information to the workshop admin page.

We'll follow up once that PR is merged and deployed. Thanks again for flagging this — it's exactly the kind of thing we need to surface to make the invitation process clearer.

[rdn32]

@mroderick as things are at the moment, if a user hasn't accepted the T&C, will be obvious to them what they need to do if I prompt them?

[mroderick]

@mroderick as things are at the moment, if a user hasn't accepted the T&C, will be obvious to them what they need to do if I prompt them?

If you point them to https://codebar.io/terms_and_conditions, they can accept the T&C there.

There are a couple of bugs, on that page, so they would have to be logged in first, for it to work.

#2582

[mroderick]

There are a couple of bugs, on that page, so they would have to be logged in first, for it to work.

Those bugs have been fixed, so it will work for everyone now :)

[mroderick]

In #2578 and #2588 I made the UI clearer, to chapter organisers can see how many members are eligble for an invite.

This should help clear up the confusion about total members vs. actual invites sent out.

I'm working on addressing the issue of many members no having accepted the T&C. That one is going to take a bit.

I'm closing this issue, as I think with the two linked PRs, it can be considered resolved.