Discobot struggles: closing welcome message on my install and not responding here on Meta

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I’m trying to fix things up with Discobot, so I created a new test user for my community and have now edited the Welcome message to my liking. I’d like to test it again –– is there a way to do that without creating another test user?

I saw references to saying “startover” or “start new user” to Discobot, so I wanted to try that, but when I went to my message conversation with it, it had closed it. disable_discourse_narrative_bot_welcome_post is false, I checked.

So I came over here to Meta to have a go with Discobot here, and it is not responding to any of my messages.

Certainly I’m missing something, but I don’t know what!

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Discobot is disabled here on Meta.

The commands to restart the tutorial won’t help you for testing the welcome message again. That message is only sent once. The command you found is about restarting the tutorial, but that starts with the message about bookmarking, not the welcome message.

I am not sure how you currently create a test user, but I usually enable it from the test user’s admin page and then impersonate them, which became even better with the upcoming change, so I no longer need to log in with my admin account afterwards.

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(post deleted by author)

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Somehow, after finishing the tutorial, running @discobot start tutorial did it again. It sends a PM to you after you post that.

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Is that the starting message of the tutorial, or the welcome message that is sent to you?

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ah good to know!

good to know too :cry:

Oh – I just created a “normal” new user with an alternate e-mail address and logged in from another browser. Is there such thing as a “test user” in the system?

Thing is, I don’t want to run through the whole tutorial, I’d just like to be able to start over to see if the modifications I made to the first message(s) look and work ok…

Bonus question: are there alternate non-AI chatbots to Discobot that we can use? (I’m saying non-AI because right now the headache of getting AI set up on my instance is too much for me, I’ll do it later, but I’d like some kind of interactive welcome messaging in the meantime.)

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After editing the first post (“Thanks for joining XYZ, and welcome!”) and running @discobot start tutorial, I could see the updated version.

One that comes to mind is Discourse Frotz 🧙.

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I am not sure we’re talking about the same message. I agree that this one is resent when you restart the tutorial (and you don’t have to finish it for doing that)

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That this one is resend is what I meant with

But if you configure Discobot to send a welcome message instead of the tutorial (Discourse Narrative Bot welcome post type setting configured to “Send all new users a welcome message with a quick start guide”) then a different message is sent

Screenshot_20260307_141436_Chrome
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And that one is not sent again if you restart the tutorial. But it is the one that is closed automatically, so I assume it’s the one used here

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Maybe Custom Wizard Plugin 🧙 is more what you want. Discobot can only react to the triggers set in the code. It cannot really make the user do anything else. So while you can change which links are used as examples for oneboxing, you cannot really create a different experience.
I suggested sending welcome messages using the automation plugin before, so I am not mentioning that again.

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You did, and thanks :hugs: for that, because it had slipped through the cracks in my brain. Definitely seems more like what I need.

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Oh, that would explain it! So if you set that, the message is just sent and closed, and it’s assumed that the user will not answer it?

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There’s no special “test user” functionality in the system – that just refers to an account you test with, as you’re doing. :+1:

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