Choose groups and watched categories on signup

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1

I know there can be custom user fields, but is there any way of sorting out group requests and category watching from the signup form?

(Either the normal Discourse signup form, or using a plugin, or separately using the API?)

Thanks.

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2

I guess there might be two possibilities.

  1. A Discourse plugin that changes the sign up process.

  2. A separate script that uses the Discourse API to sign up and simultaneously make a group request and/or watch certain categories.

I’m pretty sure it’s not possible using the standard settings.

Am I on the right track? Thanks.

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3

I’m not sure what you mean by “sorting out” but this might be the droid you’re looking for :grin:
Discourse-automation
even if sign-up is not in the Available triggers list… but I guess maybe sign-up is also user added to group TL0 ?

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4

I believe this plugin will work.

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5

The Custom Wizard Plugin looks promising. I’ll have time to try it out next month!

It looks like a wizard could be triggered straight after the user signs up, allowing notification levels to be set per category.

The plugin also allows a user to be added to a group. I’m not entirely sure how Discourse groups work, or how the plugin works with a private group (not publicly visible and/or users can’t join freely) - maybe it sends a group request. Alterernatively, the plugin allows a private message to be sent, so I could use this as a group request.

I’ll look at Discourse Automation too.

Thanks to both of you.

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Your welcome. If you figure out a template for first time set Up for users to pick categories let me know haven’t had much time to dig deep.

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I think it is now (at least, “first logged on” is close enough):

Would the Automation plugin be able to set watch status per category based on custom fields too?

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I don’t believe this is currently possible using Automation. However, I think we do have a new API endpoint that can now allow an admin to set a user’s notification level, which may be of some use:

(Though if they’re added to a group automatically, you can also set the group default notifications for categories and tags and set them that way?)

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9

Has this changed over the last year or so?

(I’d like to have prospective users, on the signup page, be able to tick certain categories to decide which to “watch”.)

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That’s an interesting use case.

You can use the “Add user to group through User Custom Field” automation script, and then set up the “Category default notifications” for the groups as you see fit.

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Thank you. I will look into that. It does have the disadvantage of potential confusion when people change their notification settings but remain in the original group.

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Is it possible now? I see that Automation is now part of Discourse itself so maybe has been improved as part of that process.

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The Automation plugin is now bundled with core, but it’s still the same plugin. Having a quick look at the current scripts and triggers it doesn’t seem like anything new has been added to help with this. :person_shrugging:

Though the ability to set default notification levels for groups is still a core feature you could leverage, especially alongside the existing Automation for ‘add user to group through user custom field’ (I think you’d need to use a separate custom field for each group).

Did you try that out? And if so, what were the problems you found with it?

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I have to admit I haven’t tried it, because of this concern:

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For this, rather than muddying things with custom fields, groups, automation, etc, would sending the new users to the /categories page after signup be an option? Using this theme component Categories Tracking Toggle I think you should be able to add the category notification level option to the categories there, and they can go down the list and pick what they want.

You may need an extra info banner on there too somewhere to provide a prompt.

This reminds me of the Mute all categories by default setup, where people would need to choose some categories to unmute/watch/etc to avoid getting a blank latest page. I don’t think it’s a particularly common setup, but there may be some topics knocking about with tips on how they handle it?

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Thanks again. I’m not too keen on using that because I think the answer to this question is still No:

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