# 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:** 9

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**Author:** ![JQ331](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/41988e/32.png) [@JQ331](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JQ331)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2021, 4:05pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/invite-people-to-reply-to-a-topic-without-them-needing-to-create-an-account/184320/9 "2021-12-10T16:05:42Z")

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> [@tobiaseigen](#):
>
> Maybe you want to take a look at [Page Publishing](https://meta.discourse.org/t/page-publishing/151971)

Thanks. I’ve thought recently that it would be cool if you could give a topic a complicated link (like dropbox, google docs, and others do)–so that anyone can access it, but you need the link to do that, and it’s unlikely anyone would have the link unless you sent it to them. That could work nicely–and get closer to the “private posts” functionality that people request on this forum every now and then.

And it wouldn’t require a published page (I could just take a public topic, but give it a complicated link to access).

I think there are two limitations presently–for a published page or just a normal topic you want to keep available to only a few select people through the “complicated link” method:

1. How do you create a complicated link for a topic? Right now, for topics and published pages, I think that the url is generated automatically and it’s a straightforward read of the title. (I guess you could create a weird title, but that wouldn’t look very good and would be confusing to people who view it.)

2. Search engines would be indexing the published page / topic, right? That would def diminish the potential privacy of the page/topic.

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