Visualizing Discourse Invite Trees
Published November 3, 2025
2 min read
I built a small Discourse plugin that shows who invited whom in your community. It displays the invite relationships as an ASCII tree, similar to how Lobsters shows their user invites.
The tree shows usernames, join dates, and how many people each user has invited. Users without an inviter (founding members or self-signups) appear at the root level, with their invite chains nested below.
The plugin works great with Discourse's native invite-only mode. If you enable invite-only registration, the tree visualization lets you see exactly how your community has grown through invites over time.
Back in 2017, someone on Meta asked about tracking referrals and
invites.
People were using Data Explorer with custom SQL queries to see this data. This
plugin makes it visual and accessible at /invite-tree.
The implementation is straightforward: a recursive SQL query builds the tree from Discourse's native invite tables, and a Glimmer component renders it with monospace font and tree characters. The whole thing is about 600 lines.
I kept it minimal and hackable. No complex features, just a clean tree that adapts to your theme. If you want to customize how it looks or what it shows, the code is easy to modify.
Check it out: discourse-invite-tree on GitHub