In a Support topic titled Customizing the user welcome PM (Blog Links), mitchellk asks how to replace external blog links in the default welcome message with content hosted on their own Discourse site. zogstrip confirms that the welcome message is fully customizable. pfaffman and jomaxro explain how to fetch raw Markdown from Meta topics using /raw/1234, enabling easy copying of content. Separately, alehman reports not receiving welcome PMs or emails despite the setting being enabled on a new DigitalOcean one-click install. pfaffman suggests upgrading from the outdated 1.6 version and warns of memory issues during upgrades due to lack of swap space, recommending ./discourse-setup after git pull. alehman later confirms the issue resolved after upgrading to 1.8.0beta5, possibly due to fixes related to Sidekiq or memory management. pfaffman adds that running ./discourse-setup post-upgrade can auto-create swap space.
Hi everyone, new to discourse so really still getting my head around tweaks all over the place. Only noticed now that the Welcome message a user gets sent includes references to:
and
Is there an easy way to copy those articles / posts to my own site and not have users leaving my site and going to meta.discourse.org?
You can customize the Welcome User Message to whatever you want 
You can get the raw markup with /raw/1234
Where 1234 is the topic ID at the end of the URL. (If memory serves.)
Correct - so the link to the raw markup of Jay’s post above is:
I am having this issue as well. “Send welcome message” is checked. New users to not receive a welcome email or PM.
This is a new “one-click install” on Digital Ocean. All other emails including invitation emails seem to be working correctly.
Around here the Install Cloud instructions are recommended. Have you upgraded to a recent version of Discourse? The 1.6 version that gets installed with their one-click install is very old. It won’t upgrade from the browser, you’ll have to log in and
cd /var/discourse
git pull
./launcher rebuild app
And then you have to do it again because of an old version of Postgres.
Note that since their one-click install doesn’t create swap space, upgrades might fail due to lack of memory. (In the days of 1.6 you didn’t need swap if you had 2GB, but upgrades are more memory hungry now. The upgrade worked for me on a clean install, though.
You can check the mail logs for errors. It may be that the welcome message you expect wasn’t in 1.6.
Thanks for the response. I did upgrade to the latest version right after I did the one-click install, and my dashboard shows 1.8.0beta5.
The problem seems to have disappeared now. The users I have created most recently have received welcome notifications and emails. I’m not sure what was going on it seems to be working now.
Well, so much for the obvious. 
I think that if you do a
cd /var/discourse
git pull
./discourse-setup
it’ll create the swap for you. (Being able to run ./discourse-setup after app.yml existed was just added, hence the git pull.)
There was some similar recent problem that may have had to do with Sidekiq and/or memory.