On discourse, is it possible to have a private discourse instance that has a button on the login page to ‘request access’ for those who haven’t been specifically invited? Right now, it seems that if your discourse is private then people either see a login page or they have to be manually invited, which seems very limiting

At my last company we had a private discourse that was tied to a login the users had to create with our company. So once they had a login with us, they automatically had access to our discourse, but if you didn't have a login with us, you hit a login page if you tried to go to our forums. Not sure if that's a potential solution for your need.

it's actually for my wife's company, but she has figured it out and its basically that she needs to upgrade for that functionality. But they cant do it without migrating all her data to a new instance 🙄