Laura.C asks how to prevent users from replying to Discobot’s welcome messages, which are causing confusion. dax suggests disabling the discourse narrative bot enabled setting or, better, changing the discourse narrative bot welcome post type to a non-interactive welcome message, which automatically closes and prevents replies. This can be customized via Admin > Customize > Site Texts. Laura.C considers disabling direct messages on the bot’s profile, but dax clarifies this only stops new messages, not replies to the tutorial. The non-interactive welcome message is the recommended solution to prevent responses.
Hi there,
I’d like to know if its possible to disable replies being sent to the bot from our users. They tend to respond to the bot’s “greetings” messages with their questions about our product which should be asked on our Community page instead. I can’t find how to do this in our Admin settings, can anybody help please?
Turn off the site setting discourse narrative bot enabled.
Or, even better, keep it enabled but instead change the setting discourse narrative bot welcome post type to Send all new users a welcome message with a quick start guide. Instead of the tutorial, Discobot will send a simple, non-interactive welcome message that will automatically close to prevent user replies.
Like all Discourse texts, you can customize the welcome message by navigating to Admin > Customize > Site Texts at the following path:
/admin/customize/site_texts?q=system_messages.welcome_user.text_body_template.
Within this string, you’ll find the variable %{new_user_tips}, which corresponds to another string: system_messages.usage_tips.text_body_template.
By modifying the text of one or both strings and setting the discourse narrative bot welcome post type to Send all new users a welcome message with a quick start guide, you should be able to create the customized message without triggering the interactive tutorial.
Disabling that setting only prevents users from sending new messages to Discobot, and in your case, it’s unnecessary because it’s Discobot itself that sends the initial message to users, not the other way around.
If it’s the interactive tutorial, the user will still be able to respond and complete the tutorial. Even if you modify the text to remove the reference to the first action - like adding a bookmark - to trigger the next step - copying and pasting a link -, the user can still respond to Discobot.
If it’s the static welcome message, it is automatically closed once it is sent to the user, meaning the user won’t be able to respond in any case. This is obviously the setting you would use if you don’t want to disable Discobot completely and if you don’t want users to be able to reply to it.
If you want to prevent users from sending new messages to Discobot, feel free to disable the option, but this is irrelevant when it comes to responding to the tutorial.
Ok didn’t know that! Amazing thanks for all your help and info, that has helped!
