I’m having trouble finding clear instructions on how to tweak this thing so it doesn’t annoy people. I also feel like I am in tech hell over here in meta trying to get answers.
We turned this bot off years ago because it was irritating people.
I am revisiting. I think maybe if it had a little more finesse it would be more useful. Like most things discourse you need to be an engineer to understand things around here so was curious if people use it or just shut it off? And is there a way to tweak it?
Recently I did get a little annoyed with the disco bot when creating a secondary backup administrator account don’t need to go through the new user tutorial again, I tried writing “stop” to the bot but it kept going.
Then when I closed the PM topic even that wouldn’t stop the tutorial because bot has admin privileges can post on closed topics.
It’s something along these lines that my community experienced! People were annoyed and couldn’t make it stop.
What I would prefer is an option for members to shut it down the moment they are over it. Plus, the ability to show them a welcome video where we introduce our service and how it works.
I suggest that something like a warning or instructions to turn it off be invluded in a pinned topic for new users. This could help them clear their confusion. Perhaps a special category for this (e.g. #guides) could be added on your forum to allow users to get familiar with the features of Discourse. That’s what a forum I’m on does.
This just reinforces my point about how cumbersome it is to make simple changes like this. I played around with your suggestion and found zero ways to actually tweak the Greetings! post. Changing the way something is displayed in my admin panel isn’t what I’m looking for. How would you edit/customize this post?
I would copy a few words of the text, like for example “I’m only a robot”. Then I’d visit /admin/customize/site_texts and put them into the search field and choose a language.
While looking at the default text, I’ll notice that the last two lines probably come from a different text, so I’d do another search for “like to learn more” to change them.
At the end, I’d create a test user to check that the message looks the way I intended.
I want to drop a welcome video in there that explains our products and services, how to cancel their membership if they need to self cancel, and where to find all the important benefits that comes with their membership. All the while I am demonstrating how our forum works.
@Bas I think having some component style settings in the admin panel would make the most sense to me. It’s a cool feature but lacks nuance. A page dedicated to the bot would be ideal. To be able to toggle on/off the steps that are relevant (or not) to our platform also make sense to me.
And then, as @c12gene mentioned, have all the relevant settings in one place.
I had done a how-to on modifying the onboarding process before (Welcome new users with customized trust level promotion messages ) What I see makes this difficult is that there are multiple parts that play together, but they are spread out through the admin backend (system messages, discobot, default texts).
Another aspect that I find is complicating adjustments is actually the “discobot” as such. By now it feels a bit like an outdated gimmick overall and it even might cause confusion when having other/multiple ai bots on an instance. I could see it more helpful if this bot would just be presented as a plain user-tutorial feature.
I was definitely surprised with the ‘flatness’ of the replace text section when initially setting up my first forum, even though it’s really helpful.
It feels like there’s a spectrum going from passive UI-type text through to active more opinionated text. I think many users assume the latter type of text is written by the forum owner/moderator, e.g. the first message prompt, the user tips, all the stuff that says “civilized”.
I wouldn’t take anything out of the replace text section, but I would—as Manuel suggests—pull out some of the most important active text into an Onboarding section. Otherwise many new moderators end up finding new text they want to edit over the first few months and it’s all a surprise.
