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

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/have-to-read-topics-or-rsvp-topics/60719>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [10 أبريل 2017، 2:39م UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/have-to-read-topics-or-rsvp-topics/60719 "2017-04-10T14:39:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![tophee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tophee/32/73406_2.png) [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)\
**Post date:** [10 أبريل 2017، 2:39م UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/have-to-read-topics-or-rsvp-topics/60719/1 "2017-04-10T14:39:39Z")

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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

- this will only work for new posts
- the “make people watch” part requires you to go quite deeply into the system (either [forking a plugin and adopting it to your needs](http://github.com/amical/discourse-watch-category) or [using the rails console](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-do-i-set-category-tracking-level-defaults-historically/53165/)).
- you cannot be sure that all your group members see the important notification message amongst possibly many others coming from the forum.

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.

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