I asked this in another thread , but it’s last post before mine was 5 years ago, so maybe it won’t get as much attention as a new topic. I have a question from a non-devleoper’s perspective. I’m using Discourse as our company’s ticket system and I have it set up successfully to create new topics fr…

Do you have an email from the customer? if so you can forward it to Discourse and it will create a staged user for them. There’s a little on this behavior here in the “forwarded emails behavior” I think you’d want to change the relevant setting to “create replies” [image] Co…

[image] awesomerobot: Do you have an email from the customer? if so you can forward it to Discourse and it will create a staged user for them. Not generally a direct e-mail. Most of the time it’s my boss forwarding me an e-mail from the customer and asking me to turn it into a ticket in order…

You can also create a staged user by simply sending them a PM, and pasting in the email address as the recipient. If they are not a member already then they will have a staged user account. If they log in later using the same email address, their account will transform magically and they will see th…

This is probably the answer I’m looking for. I’ll report back as soon as I get a chance to try it out.

Another nice trick, if you are using a group for sharing the handling of tickets with a team, is to include that group when you send the PM. That way it will be sent from the group and any replies will also come back to the group.

Good to know, but I’ve set up the ticket system to contain everything within Discourse. It’s been working very well so far except for one client that uses their own ticket system to send support requests to us, once I have more clarity on the issue I may start another topic to try and get them sort…

Oh wait, not sure why I wrote “google group” - I corrected my post. :facepalm: I meant a Discourse group of course.

Well that makes more sense, but we actually don’t use groups. We use accounts only, and topics to track tickets.

[image] tobiaseigen: You can also create a staged user by simply sending them a PM, and pasting in the email address as the recipient. If they are not a member already then they will have a staged user account. If they log in later using the same email address, their account will transform magic…

Are you an admin or moderator, or in a group that is specified in the Send email messages allowed groups site setting? If not, then that error makes sense. [Screenshot 2026-01-27 at 4.50.17 PM]

Can an admin create a staged user?

Product Support

tknospdr (David Muszynski) January 26, 2026, 4:50pm 10

This used to work for us. I just had to use it again and now I get a pop up message that says:
An error occurred: You must select a valid user.

Any idea how to get this working again?

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Can an admin create a staged user?

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