Using Discourse as a newsletter

[tornasolada]

The objective is to link users from an external website to Discourse signup form in order to subscribe to a specific group that will be used as a newsletter. However in its current form Discourse signup form requires the users to enter a password and this is not something users will do when signing up for a newsletter.

Is there a way to singup to Discourse with only an email address and no password required by the signup form similar to the invite functionality? Perhaps by adding a route to a given point say discourse.tld/newsletter?

I would like to avoid calling the API from an external website.

[franzperdido]

I also find this feature very useful.
Only a subset of our userbase will be active in the forum but we still would like to have a feature to send regular newsletters to a larger group of people who want to be updated but would not sign up with a password.

[laem (Mael)]

Yes that would be helpful for us too.
Discourse’s notifications are good, why use a second tool ?

[alangibson]

There’s a relevant discussion going on here:

Watch topic using email address without requiring registration

I’ve spent some quality time digging through the code. I think something like this (warning: very likely not working as I haven’t tried it yet) would work to allow the user to post a reply with just an email. I’d appreciate any comments you have. I’m especially not sure if this is the best way to create a staged user. I haven’t found any method that specifically creates staged users though. class SomePluginController < ApplicationController # Make sure there is a staged user in the db def…