I devoted some time this week to making some small changes aimed at improving the experience for new members here.
I disabled the discobot tutorial and welcome message completely, so there is no competing call to action for new members. Now they just land on the TOP page which has the New to Discourse? Start here! welcome topic pinned to the top. I plan to start sending a welcome message using automation but will set that up later, as I am discussing here.
I also appended ?silent=true to all internal links to the welcome topic, which has the effect of suppressing all the backlinks at the bottom of the topic. It seems we like using this topic for testing things out but the backlinks were not really related and so creating unnecessary noise for new members just as they are finding their feet here!
Now I turned my attention to the Suggested and Related links at the bottom of that topic. It turns out that the Suggested links are not shown if you are not logged in or are new and you only see the AI generated “Related” links. The links shown are outdated and unhelpful. I deleted a bunch of especially unhelpful linked topics (e.g. by people who haven’t been around for a long time offering to install Discourse for free) but the remaining links are still not the ones I think new members will want to see.
I am interested in hearing from others in the community how they are perceiving these links currently at the bottom of topics. Are they showing topics that you think are useful to you? Any improvements you’d like to see? Do you use them to easily continue reading and get caught up on discussions youa re interested in? Do you prefer Suggested or Related?
In the case of the welcome topic, I moved it to Announcements from Site feedback where I think it’s a better fit and so suggested topics include announcements, which I think new members will want to discover. This works for established logged in members.
Anons and new members who have just signed up only see the Related topics which are currently not terrible but are outdated:
I presume that after a day or so the Suggested topics will begin to appear for these members.
I will need help from folks more familar with AI Embeddings to help me tweak the settings affecting Related. The “semantic related age penalty” is currently set at 0.3. Should I up that to a higher number? If I do, will that negatively affect the results for others? Is that setting even working correctly at the moment?
Yes, particularly in the Theme component and Plugin topics, I’ve found some great additions to our instance that way.
I would agree with not showing suggested topics to new users. However, if there was a way to manually curate a suggested topics section only for that specific new user topic, that’d likely be pretty helpful!
Suggested only. I am not into AI and we’ve made an intentional decision not to enable any AI features on our instance.
FWIW The Related Topics here on meta used to be It was my most favourite AI addition (hands-down )
It has gone a bit squiffy though and seems to be prioritising less useful topics. As a now casual browser, I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but the difference does seem noticeable.
Do you know if the model was changed at any point, or maybe something else backend-wise that could have had an impact?
In general, I prefer related topics. Often AI is really helpful in showing related discussions, like related feature requests. I often look at these to suggest a merge, update them with new information (e.g., when a feature was completed), or at least tag those old topics accordingly. Sometimes I can find answers to support questions directly in the related topic because the question has been asked before.
Suggested topics are based on my unread topics. They are helpful to find topics I might want to continue reading, but they are not related to the topic I am currently reading. I used to read those topics based on latest. So actually, until February, that list was empty for me most of the time, so I only had suggested topics tab below topics. Now that I mostly read without being logged in, that’s no longer the case. Most topics shown there are topics I’ve read, but Discourse doesn’t know that. I am still forced to look at them because every time I log out, Discourse deletes the localStorage where it saved that I prefer related topics. So usually those are what I see because it’s not always worth switching. But these are, of course, problems based on my perhaps unusual use.
In general, I see use cases for both, my unread topic and other topic with similar content. Related topics based on AI instead of category was a huge improvement. It made them way more interesting.
But of course, it depends on the topic. The more detailed the problem is described, the better the suggestions are. To me, it makes sense that the suggestions below the welcome topic aren’t that helpful, because there aren’t several welcome topics on Meta.
I wondered whether, if you think they are confusing, it would make sense to hide these from new users, just as Discourse does not display other options to new users and therefore shows things that are hidden for more experienced users. But I think, apart from the welcome topic, they can be helpful for new users too because sometimes they find the answer to their question right there.
Interestingly, I had thought the Related Topics had been showing older ones that weren’t as useful. On this topic, the Related Topics had been mainly 2017/18 ish, whereas now it’s been turned off they’re now much more recent (2023/24).
On the off-chance, was the penalty perhaps reversed?
That’s one, quite wonderfully descriptive, way to describe it!
At the bottom of the welcome topic, my test new user now gets Suggested topics! It’s been two hours since I created the account. Not sure at what point they started showing up.
I agree this would be a fantastic idea for the welcome topic. Can you see if that feature request exists already and if not start a new feature request, explaining your own use case?
Yes, for the reason you give I’d prefer to show related topics but for them to be actually more relevant and recent. In the case of the welcome topic, I’d like it to show announcements, blog posts, etc or any other topics that are relevant to new members who are just finding out about us.
Mostly in line with what others have said: my impression was that suggested topics are of limited use most of the time. E.g. right now, what I see as suggested for this topic is
That hardly seems related to the topic at hand at all.
Related topics, on the other hand, have often brought up discussion that actually seemed related, and sometimes appeared to be interesting enough to actually check them. E.g. right now I get
I’m a bit surprised about the ordering (I would have expected the last item to appear further up, because it’s frequently accessed), but overall it does not seem so bad.
Among the various AI features that Discourse offers, related topics is actually one of the two (the other is AI-based SPAM classification) I would be willing to turn on, if we ever get to the point, where we get affordable vGPUs or vNPUs and self-hosting the LLM becomes an option.
It was my most favourite AI addition (hands-down 
)
It’s been two hours since I created the account. Not sure at what point they started showing up.
