# Invite people to reply to a topic without them needing to create an account

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/invite-people-to-reply-to-a-topic-without-them-needing-to-create-an-account/184320>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [March 24, 2021, 4:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/invite-people-to-reply-to-a-topic-without-them-needing-to-create-an-account/184320 "2021-03-24T16:17:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![debryc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/debryc/32/101652_2.png) [@debryc](https://meta.discourse.org/u/debryc)\
**Post date:** [April 14, 2021, 7:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/invite-people-to-reply-to-a-topic-without-them-needing-to-create-an-account/184320/5 "2021-04-14T19:29:43Z")

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> [@tobiaseigen](#):
>
> A use case I can imagine for me personally is to invite family members and friends who are reluctant to join the private discourse site I am using to manage family projects like photo albums and such. I know they will be excited to hear about isolated topics, add replies and talk with me and maybe a few other people in those topics. However, they will not ever want to join the site and be burdened by logging in to reply and also seeing all the other topics they are not interested in. But this is a fairly particular and likely rare use of Discourse, and I am able to deal with it by just emailing these people separately to talk to them about my projects.

This is precisely my user profile as well. They want to engage in just one topic, for example, but don’t need to or want to see everything else. This is actually quite common for us because we’re a grassroots organizing organization. We’re always interacting with people who are at the periphery of our network whose involvement is necessary in some specific instances but who would be overwhelmed by any more information.

> [@tobiaseigen](#):
>
> I guess we could achieve what you describe by following the example of how staff can PM email addresses, creating staged users who can then reply and get emails whenever their PMs are replied to - and if they decide to create an account later, they gain full access to their activity as former staged users. A button could be provided to send a post to an email address, maybe with a personal note at the top. A staged user would be created and the full post would be sent to them by email. If they reply, they’d then be watching the topic so they get future replies (this came up in [another topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/send-email-to-non-registered-user-in-a-group/184830/13) this week). If they are overwhelmed they can use the unsubscribe link in the footer of the email.

Yes, this is exactly what I think would work and what I had assumed inviting someone to a topic would do when done via email because it mirrors how personal messaging to an email works.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/invite-people-to-reply-to-a-topic-without-them-needing-to-create-an-account/184320)._