I suspect this might have to be a marketplace topic, but I’d like to start here because I feel there’s merit for it from a community standpoint.
Shortly we’re going to start a process of welcoming new members weekly in a new topic under our announcements category. The post will tag the new members and have a short call to action to introduce themselves.
I understand that there an automated direct message that they get as part of Discourse, so this would be an additional call to engage.
From the community perspective, the goal is to
Creating weekly “cohorts” so that there is a potential creation of a bond between that specific group. A sense of commonality.
Show that they weren’t the only person that signed up this week. Others did too, so they made the right decision by joining the community.
With those two in mind, encourage them to introduce themselves to the cohort for that week and therefore the community at large.
@HAWK might be able to add some insights from the community/engagement side too.
Could this process be automated?
I’m sure there is a limit for the number of tagged people in a topic… but until certain communities hit that point, I think this is worth exploring.
This definitely sounds like it could be a good way to get new users involved, and it could help close that initial gap of turning a registered member into an active participant.
One manual way to do this today would be to create your new introduction topic every week/month and then edit the automated welcome message to link to the current topic.
This also sounds mildly similar to a plugin we’ve been talking about internally that would pair two users together to encourage more collaboration and pair programming amongst our own team. This could be additional functionality (or a fork) of that concept — where instead of choosing two users at random, you could automate a topic that “pairs” a larger group of users together who meet a certain criteria (e.g., signed up within X time).
Cool idea! Sounds very similar to Mingle - An Introductions Plugin by @gdpelican — maybe that could be extended to support additional match criteria. I haven’t used it yet but looks like it already supports specific groups + group sizes! This could probably get pretty close to the use case @SouperC described.