It was 10 minutes before our Metro Detroit WordPress meetup was going to start. And we were puzzled.
One of our new members, Mike, volunteered to take notes of our speaker talks and post them to our meetup site.
I had sent a WordPress.com invitation to Mike, thinking we would get it set up quickly.
Another volunteer offered to take photos during the meetup, so we knew we’d have some great shots to include in the meetup recap blog post.
Except Mike couldn’t accept the invitation. When he selected the link to accept the invitation, he received the following message:
An active access token must be used to accept an invite.
Huh? What did that mean?
Searching for Help
The message wasn’t very helpful in pointing out what the problem was.
I did a quick Google search for the message, hoping for a quick solution.
No luck. The search results were pointing to lots of posts about translations.
I sent a tweet to the WordPress.com Twitter account. Depending on the time of day, they can be really quick to reply.
https://twitter.com/redcrew/status/696836861017374721
Mike decided to take notes in a Google document. I’d publish the notes and figure out what was going on.
What You Need to Accept a WordPress.com Invitation
The next morning, I received a reply from WordPress.com Twitter account:
And discovered a few more things to know about WordPress.com invites:
- To invite someone, all you need is their email address. Or, if they already have a WordPress.com account, their username.
- Anyone accepting an invite will need to select the Accept Invitation link in the invitation email message
- If the person you’re inviting is logged into their WordPress.com account with the email address or WordPress.com user name you used for the invitation, and selects the Accept Invitation link, they’ll be directed to your blog
- If the person you invited doesn’t have a WordPress.com account, they’ll be directed to register for a free WordPress.com account, and provide an email address, username, and password.
They don’t need to register a blog.
Once their WordPress.com account is created, they will need to return to the invitation email message and select the Accept Invitation link. And then they’ll be directed to your blog.
Still Can’t Accept an Invitation?
If the people you’ve invited to your blog are still unable to accept the invitation, here’s a few tips to recommend to them:
- Accept the invitation in another browser
- Clear the cache in their browser and try selecting the invitation link again
- Contact WordPress.com support
In my research, I discovered there was a brief glitch in the invitation system last week, but it’s been resolved.
A couple things to note: to add users to your WordPress.com blog, they must accept the invitation you send to their email address or username. If they’re logged in as another user, the invitation link will fail.
