It’s great to have custom-fields that users are asked to fill in upon sign-up, but there is an obvious trade-off: every user user field increases the chance that someone who wanted to sign-up changes their mind and wanders off.
So I’d like to suggest a way of getting new users to provide some information while making sure that this doesn’t scare them away. Now, to be clear, this means that this information cannot be strictly required at sign-up (duh), so stuff that is really really required still needs to be on the sign-up form. But what I’m looking for is something for everything that does not have to be on the sign-up form.
What comes to mind is a page to which the new user can redirected directly after sign-up and which would then ask for some more information. In some use-cases it might be sufficient if that page is simply some survey page (google forms, survey monkey or whatever), but it would be complicated to link that form data to the discourse user account. So, ideally, discourse would also provide such a “welcome page” on which specially flagged custom fields would be displayed (and those would not show up on the sign-up form). Hosting that “welcome page” in discourse would also have the advantage that it could, for example, be displayed after every login until the user has provided the requested information.
I suspect that part of the above is already possible somehow. So two questions: how? and: how about adding this as a fully featured feature?
BTW: this “welcome page” could also display a set of groups among which the user is asked to choose one or more to join, as discussed here.