Have-to-read topics? (or RSVP topics)

Feature
1

Let’s say you have a of topic that every member of a group has to read, let’s say because you need a response from everyone (to confirm whether they will attend a meeting, what they want to eat or to cast their vote etc). Unless you want to start sending out emails again, you’ll want to find some way of doing this in discourse. And, indeed, discourse has the potential to do this better than sending rsvp emails because it would be able to handle also people who join the group after the topic was published.

So this would make it possible to setup a welcome topic for a group that all new members of the group are required to read, or conference participants registering late would be asked to indicate their diet requirements without the need of sending another email

The question is how to achieve this in discourse? And I’d say that it is not currently possible. The closest you can get is to make people watch categories or tags to which you then publish these important messages, but

So how about the possibility of marking a topic as “must read” or “RSVP” for all members of a given group? The result of such a marker (probably tags would do the job, but see below) would be that members of a group would be repeatedly notified about the need to read/reply to that topic. Until they do it. The same would apply to new members of that group.

To prevent these must-read notification accumulating indefinitely over time, these markers/tags would probably need to have an expiry date after which they self-destroy or at least stop triggering notifications. This might make it a bit clunky to use tags for this but it should be feasible by prescribing a certain tag-format, e.g. must-read-20170501. But even then it would probably be more elegant if these tags could be hidden or so.

I suppose that this is something for a plugin but I guess it would still need some support in the core.

1 Like
2

We are searching for something similar.
A Must-Read Notification or Dismissable Announcement would be great.

the classical “pinned” messages do not work as strong call-to-actions.

3

You can use the custom wizard plugin to force people to view something.

4

We do something similar to this for topics that require people to confirm they have taken an action. The basic idea is to create a list of user names in the topic that are prepended with a :white_large_square:, and then ask users to edit the :white_large_square: icon to a :white_check_mark: when they have taken the action. It works because people get a notification when their username is added to the list. If someone fails to respond, they can be reminded to do so.

5

What about using the Policy Plugin? You could include it at the bottom of the post to force people to acknowledge that they’re read it.

8 Likes