The discussion is about the existence of an advanced user tutorial for Discourse. nedbat mentioned a Licensed badge that suggests the tutorial exists, but the command to start it was unclear. simon provided the correct command, @discobot start advanced tutorial, which nedbat confirmed worked.
The conversation then shifted to the @discobot display help command, which does not clearly show how to start the advanced tutorial. nedbat and justin.noom suggested that the help message could be improved to make it clearer. codinghorror expressed some hesitation about changing the help message, but rikling and nedbat argued that spelling out the two possibilities for the tutorial name would be more user-friendly.
nedbat suggested that the help message could be edited to prioritize user experience over flexibility for future changes. He also proposed a possible solution in post #15 and created a pull request to implement the change.
I see there’s a badge called Licensed, described as “Completed our advanced user tutorial.” Topics here suggest the advanced tutorial can be started by typing “@discobot start advanced user”, but on my hosted instance, it’s not understood.
What am I missing?
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
The command to start the advanced discobot tutorial is:
@discobot start advanced tutorial
Maybe details about starting the advanced tutorial should be included in the post that is created when a user posts @discobot display help ?
Thanks, that works! Yes, it seems entirely reasonable to me for “display help” to show this. Now that I know the incantation, I can see how the current help message is trying to tell me what to say, but it is far from obvious.
Doesn’t it?
@discobot display help
I currently know how to do the following things:
@discobot start tutorial
Starts one of the following interactive tutorials: tutorial, advanced tutorial.
@discobot roll 2d6
3, 6
@discobot quote
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you — Princess Diana
@discobot fortune
You may rely on it
Looks correct to me ↑ ↑ @nedbat
If I could suggest an edit:
It was not clear to me that the “tutorial, advanced tutorial” part was meant to be used as part of the command.
Ditto! My moderators have raised the same concerns.
I mean .. maybe? Do we really need multiple examples, e.g. does someone read
@discobot roll 2d6
and really need to see
@discobot roll 12d20
@discobot roll 1d10
to understand that the numbers can be substituted as needed? 
Although it is fair to note that only the tutorial expects different words, e.g.
@discobot start {name-of-tutorial}
where {name-of-tutorial} can be either tutorial or advanced tutorial.
When there’s only two possibilities, instead of every natural number, it makes sense to just spell it out.
Your idea works for me too.
The copy can’t be easily edited; it’s programmatic
`@%{discobot_username} %{reset_trigger} %{default_track}`
> Starts one of the following interactive tutorials: %{tracks}.
I don’t mean to fixate on this too much, but: you could easily edit this text if you decide that helping users find the two current tutorials is more important than YAGNI coding for a future possibility of a third tutorial.
Or, move the construction of the bot commands into the Ruby code. The text won’t change from locale to locale.
Or, change it to your suggestion:
`@%{discobot_username} %{reset_trigger} {name-of-tutorial}`
> Starts an interactive tutorial. `{name-of-tutorial}` can be one of: `%{tracks}`.
(pull request: Clarify how to start a tutorial by nedbat · Pull Request #7944 · discourse/discourse · GitHub)