I understand why the original welcome PM has been deprecated in favour of discobot’s welcome message. Nevertheless, I think it would be good to allow for an additional welcome message sent to new users via email (only). It’s obviously possible to trigger such a message externally via a webhook, but why outsource what could easily be had inside discourse. So my suggestion would be to add a third option to the discourse narrative bot welcome post type dropdown: “Start the new user tutorial for all new users and also send a welcome email”
There are many reasons why site admins might want to send a welcome email in addition to the bot’s PM but I’ll just mention what I think is an important trade-off/double bind in the current situation with only the bot message: the more custom info I add to the bot’s welcome message, the less likely people will see the tutorial at the end (which, I think, is the bot’s main purpose). So it is advisable to keep the bot’s message as short as possible and put all additional information into an email.
Email will be sent about the PM if the user signs up and immediately closes the browser. Same rule applies to all PM notifications if the user does not have a web browser open.
That’s good to know. But my point was about having two distinct messages, one delivered by the bot with some very basic info and geared towards the new user tutorial, and the other delivered by email with whatever additional info a new user is supposed to get.
@AdamCapriola wrote some custom wordpress code for us to send automated PMs via discourse for various purposes, including at signup. I’m not sure how active he is here these days. If he is active, I’d be happy for him to share what he has done for the benefit of all, excluding any identifiable references to Namati and any custom code that doesn’t make sense for other sites.
If not, I could share his code privately with you, @tophee, or perhaps the core team. You could then extract the useful and sharable parts of the wordpress plugin, or update the official wp-discourse plugin to include it.
The way Adam’s code works, we have an unpublished page containing the PM content which we can tweak as we move along. There are some replaceable tokens for personalization. It’s pretty nice! See screenshots below.
So the reason you are using WordPress for this is because you are using WordPress for many other things too, right?
How is your SSO set up? Is Discourse the SSO provider or WordPress? Either way, there seem to be some limitations, e. g. with users ability to change their name or username with that kind of integration… Or perhaps this works independently of SSO?
It is obviously an excellent solution for your community and I appreciate your willingness to share the code. But without having tried either, my impression is that (unless your sokution works without SSO) the easier option for me would be to set up a webhook to send an email based on a template.
Indeed, I would like to send an email rather than a PM, but I’m willing to compromize…
Regardless, I am still very curious to hear from the team whether there is any chance of bringing back/adding the possibility of having both a welcome email and the greeting by the bot.
WordPress is the sso provider, using the standard wp_discourse plugin. Users can change their names via WordPress. Usernames can only be changed by our staff and that’s good.
We do also fire off emails via Adam’s code, but prefer and really like that members get PMs.
Incidentally… this is not the behavior on my site. The user signs up and is redirected to discourse upon email verification, gets the greyed screen highlighting the notification and can start the discobot process. But the user also gets the email notification immediately as well. I wish discobot messages would never trigger emails.
Could be but I’m not sure why that would be. Or maybe it’s the default notification setting? I just realized this was selected. I just deselected it now to return to the discourse default.
I would really appreciate an option for the welcome messages to appear to come from a real-life person (me), and for the new member to be able to reply.
The personal touch is important for my local community forum.
