The discussion revolves around customizing “JIT (just in time) notifications”—yellow alerts in Discourse that appear based on specific conditions. pgr seeks ways to personalize these alerts, suggesting features like conditional triggers (e.g., new topics, user age, text matching) and customizable actions. They highlight the potential for community training and reference existing tools like topic templates and reply templates. erlend_sh clarifies the term “JIT notifications” and points to a plugin for implementation. JammyDodger notes that existing JIT alert texts can be edited via the site texts admin page, while Moin suggests topic templates as a complementary solution. JammyDodger also shares additional tools like reply templates and URL-based prefilling for similar use cases.
Searching these forums, I couldn’t find much… maybe I don’t know how to search, is there a name for these? Yellow alerts? Instructional modals? Big Brother? Obscure-my-preview Esc X bot?
If the answer is that they’re not customizable, I’m going right in to feature request mode, I see enormous community-training possibilities here, even more than Topic Templates.
The really interesting thing to have would be a model that allows customizing both
detection based on a number of conditions
is this a reply or a new topic being started
how old is the previous reply
is this a new/recent user?
free text regexp match (“you mentioned X, please check this helpful link first”)
action like selecting a nice appropriate text for the yellow alert
If it can’t be a plugin, at least a Ruby-code-level customization possibility would be nice.
I see that Discourse itself is already using this effectively in several places, I’d love to be able to use those super-powers for Community-specific things.
Ah thanks, you’re right, armed with that “JIT” term I was able to search much more profitably.
I even remembered I had read this old @codinghorror post:
I think it makes every bit of sense to extend that philosophy beyond generic Discourse triggers, into Community-specific behavior.
What I would give to be able to just nudge people to tell us the freaking software version they’re running while asking for support… I can’t get back the 3.7 years of life already spent typing “what’s your version”, but at least some of my future could look brighter.
Is it just me, or this deserves a user-friendly plug-in, or even a core-UI for the simplest cases (edit the default texts)? Maybe it’s just me.
and yes, I see them as a piece of the same puzzle