Your invitation will be forwarded. A cousin will paste it into a family group, an aunt will send it on to her sister, and someone you meant to invite but never wrote down will open it and want to reply. Replies from that shared link are switched on by default, and every one of them arrives pending: it counts nothing, changes no total, and sits in a queue until you approve it yourself.
The guests who were never written down
Every guest list has people on it who exist only in somebody’s head. Your mother’s friend from church, who has known you since you were four. The cousin’s new husband, married since you drafted the list. The three colleagues your father invited at a wedding in March and mentioned to nobody. You will not find these people by reading your spreadsheet again. You find them when the link reaches them.
So the question is not whether your invitation gets forwarded. It is what happens when a person you never added opens it and taps reply. Either the link refuses them and they telephone somebody, or it takes their reply and holds it somewhere it cannot do any damage.
What happens when someone replies from the shared link
Every guest you add gets their own personalised link, and the invitation also has one public address of its own. The public address is the one that travels. Open it with no personal link attached and the invitation looks identical, except that the reply form opens by asking who you are: a name, and a mobile number to reach you on. Your dashboard holds no record of this visitor, so the visitor supplies one.
After that the form behaves like anybody else’s. Yes or no, how many people they are bringing, a message if they want to leave one, and answers to any questions you have added. If you have turned on per-ceremony replies, they answer each ceremony separately, so a neighbour can accept the reception and decline the homecoming.
Their answer becomes a guest record marked as having come from the public link, and it lands pending. Pending is doing a specific job:
- They are not in your attending total, your declined total or your head count.
- They do not appear in your guest table alongside everybody else.
- They cannot be seated. The seating designer does not see them.
- You are told they arrived, by email or a push notification, unless you have switched RSVP alerts off.
Nothing about your numbers moves. Somebody you have never met cannot add four people to your catering count by typing four into a box.
Reviewing them without inflating your numbers
Pending replies collect in a strip at the top of your guest links page, with a count on it. Each row carries what you need in order to decide:
- The name and mobile number they gave.
- Whether they are coming, and for how many.
- Which invitation they replied to, and their answer per ceremony when there is more than one.
- Their message, if they left one.
- A tag if they have replied before, and a tag if you turned them down once already.
Approve, and they join your list and your totals like any invited guest. Reject, and they do not. Rejecting deletes nothing: the row is kept, collapsed at the foot of the page, so if the same number returns you can see it was turned down before. Neither decision is final, and rejecting somebody you approved last week drops them back out of your totals. If a person you approved returns and changes their answer, their row goes back into the queue and you are told, rather than a settled head count moving underneath you.
Do not review these one at a time as the notifications land. Let them collect, then sit down once a week with whoever actually knows the family, usually a parent, and go through the strip together. Plenty of the names in that queue will mean nothing to you and everything to your mother.
When to switch public replies off
Sometimes the right answer is no reply at all. Public replies are a toggle in the editor, on unless you turn them off, and there are weddings where turning them off is simply correct.
Turn them off if your number is fixed and you have no authority to add anybody: a seated dinner at capacity, a room with a legal limit, a family lunch of thirty. Turn them off if you would honestly prefer everything to come through you by telephone, which for a small wedding is reasonable and less work than any dashboard.
With the toggle off, the invitation still opens for anyone who receives the link. It simply offers no way to reply. Your invited guests are unaffected, because their personal links keep working as normal.
An RSVP deadline closes the same door on a timer, if you have set one. Once that date passes the public form stops accepting replies and tells the visitor to contact you directly instead. A link still circulating in a family group cannot add anybody after you have handed your numbers over.
Giving your caterer a number you can stand behind
Your caterer will eventually ask for a final figure, and they will want one figure, not a range. The pending queue holds the arithmetic still while you decide. Every total on your RSVP dashboard is a total of people you approved, so it does not creep upward each time the link gets forwarded.
The order is what matters here: clear the pending strip first, then read your numbers, then send them. Not the other way round. If you take your number on Monday and approve four people on Tuesday, you have told your caterer something that is no longer true. Your guest list and your head count only agree when the queue is empty.
The people waiting in that queue are rarely gatecrashers. They are usually the ones you would have been mortified to miss.
Frequently asked questions
Can a stranger add themselves to my guest list?
Not to the list that counts. Anyone replying through the public link lands in a pending queue, outside your totals, your guest table and your seating. They are on your list only once you approve them, and you can reverse that afterwards.
What if an invited guest uses the public link instead of their own?
You get a second record for them rather than an update to the first, because a public form cannot overwrite a guest you entered by hand. Match them on the mobile number, reject the public copy, and put their answer on the row you already had.
Do I have to keep public replies switched on?
No. It is a toggle in the editor and you can turn it off at any point, after which the invitation still opens but shows no reply form. Anything already sitting in your pending queue stays there for you to approve or reject.
Related: Online RSVP dashboard · Wedding guest list manager