Do we need a help button on the composer?

feature
26

No: the discobot is running. Even on this meta site, if you click the Chat and try to send a message “@discobot start tutorial” nothing happens.

I see what happened on one site (which I don’t administer): It has a “Personal chat” which appears below “Messages”, and I tried to use that by mistake. When you click on + in Personal chat you get a box that says “#a-channel, @somboy or anything” where I tried to type @discobot start tutorial. This failed because it is a search box.

It does work to type “@discobot start tutorial” in a topic, but then it seems like you are starting a tutorial in the middle of that topic, which is probably not what I want.

The verbiage in various places implies that I should be able to use @discobot anywhere and it will work… but this does not seem to work in the Chat for example. I ran through with a few other users to see what they would do to try and find help, and – even after I told them about the discobot tutorials, it was painful watching them try to start the discobot.

Similar issues are discussed in New users aren't starting the discobot tutorial - #32 by Dax.

Thanks for the help: I at least know now what to tell people to do. (I still think that an appropriate help button somewhere would be useful.)

3 Likes
28

Well, IMO that’d be expected, since discobot is intended for private messages not private chats.

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29

If your users are anything like the teachers, students, and everyone else I’ve seen use computers for the past 40 years (including myself, sometimes when I’ve written the instructions) still think no one would read it. :beer:

3 Likes
30

I was looking for something similar to your request. I recently installed this plugin GitHub - cpradio/discourse-plugin-composer-help-button: Add a Help Button to the Composer Window in Discourse on my forum instance. Although the ? button appears as one of the message editor buttons, it is not active. I still haven’t found a solution to this problem(

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