Looking at the flow of the discobot’s dynamic tutorial, it strikes me that this sort of automated replying would be a really useful feature to customise. For example if I ran a course with step-by-step instructions, I could have automated messages sequentially guide a user through a process.
I know it is possible to customise the bot, but is there any way to run a simple auto-reply to other messages?
There is the Custom Wizard Plugin 
or your could create your own plugin.
I don’t personally know of a plugin designed to specifically do what you would like to.
If the Custom Wizard Plugin linked to above would take a bit more effort to setup than you’re looking for, discourse-templates would make sending responses manually more convenient. I reckon they’re your two best options unless you’re interested in creating a custom plugin as suggested by Pfaffman.
Thank you both. I wouldn’t know where to begin with creating a plugin so I think setting up templates is a good solution here, especially as the community is just starting out so the manual step isn’t too taxing.
I guess the feature I was describing would be to just add an element of automation to these templates - could be a cool feature request to log!
Hrm, actually… I don’t know if this is helpful, but you can configure Discourse to always email you when you receive a Message. It should be possible to implement the functionality you’re looking for outside of Discourse, and then simply use email to get messages in and out of the forum software.
I quickly googled around and came across this guide for Gmail, which includes using canned replies that automatically get sent based on filters (e.g. the incoming email features particular phrases);
https://flashissue.com/blog/2016/06/15/create-auto-reply-gmail/
If you use a different email provider, they likely have equivalent features.
Maybe you can use Discourse Automation