Alerts that react to the user

I’m trying to customize these yellow alerts:

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? :slight_smile:

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.

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We call them JIT (just in time) notifications. I’m not aware of any docs for them, but this plugin should have an example of how to create a custom JIT notice: GitHub - discourse/discourse-perspective-api: Google Perspective API Plugin for Discourse

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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.

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You can customise the text of the existing ones from the [YourSite]admin/customize/site_texts page. :+1:

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Maybe What are Topic Templates? are an option for you

Thanks, I’m on to that already :point_up: and yes, I see them as a piece of the same puzzle

For the device/version issue, some people have found the reply templates useful, and others have used the reply-by-url feature to prefill some custom blurb in the composer.

Not sure if they’re useful, but thought I’d throw them into the mix. :slightly_smiling_face:

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