First-PM notification should not trigger when first login is in a topic

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AI-generated summary

A discussion is underway about the timing of the first-PM notification on Discourse forums. erlend_sh proposes an exception to the strong PM notification: if a user is already in a topic upon first-login, don’t apply the first-PM overlay. This is because the notification can be distracting and cause users to lose their train of thought. codinghorror suggests limiting the first PM spotlight effect to when the user is on latest or categories. However, tophee notes that there’s a trade-off between not disturbing the user and ensuring they receive the first message from discobot. tgxworld thinks it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement an exception for certain routes. Stranik shares a personal experience where they missed reading the rules due to responding immediately after registering.

1

I’ve encountered the following quite a few times:

  1. Find a forum I like; start reading a few topics.
  2. Land on a topic that I’d like to respond to, so I register
  3. After registration I’m redirected back to the topic that I wanted to engage with, but then I get disrupted by our intro-PM:

IMG_0109.PNG1536×753 52.6 KB

I already had an action in mind, but now I’m being very strictly instructed to do something else first. More often than not, this has caused me to completely lose my train of thought, and I already know all about this PM and its contents!

To avoid this, how about an exception to the strong PM notification:

IF user is already in a topic upon first-login, THEN don’t apply the first-PM overlay.

(Sorry about the convoluted title. Feel free to rewrite it if you can come up with something better.)

3 Likes
2

Is it possible to limit the first PM spotlight effect to when the user is on latest or categories @tgxworld?

2 Likes
3

There is a bit of a trade-off here: we don’t want to disturb/annoy the user but we also want to make sure that the first message the user receives is the one from discobot… Currently, the way to solve this is via the discobot delay setting.

4

Shouldn’t be too difficult to not display it on a couple of routes.

5 Likes
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It’s not very good, I think. For example, I read, registered and responded immediately. I didn’t read the rules. Missed a letter, bot.