Multisite user cannot add themselves as a site's member

[fabacab]

A user on a Buoy Multisite ("Landfall") network can not add themselves to a specific Buoy site. They have to be added by a site admin to their site after creating their own account on the network.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to the registration URL for any site in a Multisite network (like example-site.multisite-network-domain.com/wp-login.php?action=register).
2. This will redirect you to the network-wide sign up URL (like multisite-network-domain.com/wp-signup.php)
3. Make a new account with a "Just a username, please," option, indicating a desire to have a Buoy account but not become a Site Admin (i.e., a Buoy Admin).
4. You will have access to your Dashboard but not be added to any sites.

Expected results

Your user account should have been automatically added as a default user role to the site that you originally registered at. In the example above, this would have been example-site.

Actual results

Your user account is a pseudo-subscriber to the network, instead of being an actual subscriber to the example-site site.

Workarounds

For now, you will have to communicate to the Site Admin of the site you tried to sign up to that you have a network ("Landfall") account and that you want to be added to their site ("Buoy").

Other information

This is a known usability "issue" in WordPress and is not specific to Buoy. See:

• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/multisite-user-registration
• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/multisite-and-user-registration
• https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/multisite-subsite-new-user-registration-that-does-not-go-through-main-site
• https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/124532/user-registration-on-subsite-in-multisite-configuration

Therefore, it seems this issue is a good candidate for a stand-alone plugin specifically to address this issue.

My initial instinct is to try to hook the wp_signup_location filter and add a querystring argument indicating that the signup originated from a subsite on the network (if, indeed, it did). Then we can modify the network-wide signup form, perhaps adding a separate option or simply automatically adding them to the original site when they register a "just a username."

[fabacab]

I got in touch with the developers of the Activist Network Platform (ANP), so some of this stuff is going to be addressed by contributing to that project instead and using it as the basis for any Landfall service.

The way ANP deals with this seems to be using the Join My Multisite plugin.

I'm gonna leave this issue open for now but for the sake of clarity I will probably be closing all Landfall-related issues if I end up working with the ANP folks more closely.

[fabacab]

Landfall has been obsoleted by Glocal Coop's Activist Network Platform, so this issue is now out of scope.

[fabacab]

For future reference, though, the Multisite User Management plugin can also solve this problem by assigning default user roles to existing sites.