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 from non-registered users in our support forum. Occasionally, I need to create a ticket on behalf of a customer instead of them creating it directly. Is there an easy step by step way to do this and create a topic on behalf of someone that does not already have an account on the forum? I don’t want them to have a full account unless they sign up for one themselves. If it has to be done from a command line interface, that’s fine, but I need some hand holding such as: Enter container with foo Type rails bar etc etc Whatever else needs to be done I’m aware that I can reassign posts so if it’s too complicated to do everything, just the instructions to create the user, then using the GUI to change owner would be very helpful. As long as I can write a detailed help desk article for the rest of the staff to follow I don’t care what it entails. Would be awesome not to have to have all staff needing access to the container via ssh, but we’ll make due if that’s unavoidable.

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] Configuring incoming email to create new topics or group messages Site Management bookmark This guide explains how to configure Discourse to create new topics or group messages from incoming emails. It covers site settings, group configuration, and category settings. person_raising_hand Required user level: Administrator Configure incoming email to create new topics or group messages Discourse allows you to send emails to a special address to automatically create new topics in a category or new group messages. This feature is useful for integrating Discourse with ext…

[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 to reply to them. I’m guessing all that would do is create the topic using my boss’s e-mail as the user assigned to who created the ticket.

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 their PMs on the site.

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 sorted.

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 magically and they will see their PMs on the site. 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?

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) September 16, 2025, 6:30pm 5

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

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Can an admin create a staged user?

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