The Bot really is a stroke of genius.
The first couple of days after we went live with Discourse I spent a lot of time more or less doing what Discobot does, but I was only able to interact with a small number of users at any given time. It also didn’t help that I was myself completely new to Discourse.
For an example of what one of those dialogues looked like, see here. Fortunately the user and I ended up creating a sort of Socratic dialogue which ended up being a user guide.
The Bot is a lot less labour intensive.