Designing the First Time Setup Wizard

One of the steps mention “skip this step” but I don’t see any “skip”?

Perhaps if the user hasn’t changed any of the values, “Next” should say “Skip”.

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Not all steps are skippable. Pretty sure people know how to smash a next button :wink:

This is more important for re-running the wizard on a site that’s already set up - I need assurance that I’m not messing anything up by looking through it.

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I had that issue too - luckily there is the admin log.

I noticed the “welcome message” does not prepopulate the second time you run it.

It says I have 8 moderators on the last step but doesn’t say who they are or what will be sent to them, or what will happen when I hit next. Generally this is a step I feel a bit uneasy about.

I also need to consult with others on the key info - what I ended up doing is taking screenshots of the key pages and hope to return to them later.

I have unhappily started every sentences in this post with I.

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I don’t really consider you or Kane particularly representative. Remember the primary audience is brand new sites, not reflexively running this over and over on sites that have been active for years…

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Yep - you’re right.

But… as it happens, I am actually setting up a brand new site now for my son’s school. :wink: So this is timely and is the experience I am reporting here.

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I am extremely confused, then, how you ended up with 8 pre-existing moderators on a new first run install.

I had already installed it last week and started setting it up.

Right, then you aren’t in the intended audience, it is for first run.

Running after the fact on an existing, already set up site isn’t the primary goal… it’s OK for feedback purposes within reason, but viewing this through the lens of “everything in this Wizard MUST make PERFECT sense running this much later when everything is already set up” just isn’t the goal from my perspective.

However to @riking’s point, if “Skip” vs “Next” addresses this (and I really, really don’t think it will since Nobody Reads Anything™) then we could do that, I guess.

OK - makes sense.

However, I want to benefit from this as well! There’s clearly a lot of thought you guys have put into this and I’m keen to understand it.

To recontextualize this, the goal of the wizard is to make sure the first admin who signs up, leaves that form with a configured Discourse having invited at least 2 other staff members to make 3 staff members total.

It is our strong belief that a site with only one admin/staff member just Isn’t Going To Succeed. Who exactly is going to seed the site with content, when there is one person on the site, no matter how fully and prettily configured that site may be?

Remember, again, this is a new site and that’s the first admin who signed in, so there are zero other accounts active on the site at that point.

Since you had eight already…

cc @eviltrout I can support changing the button from “Next” to “Skip” when nothing has changed, or rather, make it Skip by default and change to Next when something does change? If it’s easy. The problem is that we really don’t want the first admin to skip ANY of these steps :frowning:

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In my use case where I was the only teacher and everyone else was a a student, I didn’t need 3 admins. I’m definitely an edge case, though.

In that case you can just say “Ok” to the warning that pops up and continue :slight_smile:

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Something is up with the translations – shouldn’t untranslated strings be shown in English?

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This case is a bit different as you are changing the translation in the drop down in the first step.

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We added preliminary mobile support for the wizard, so running through this on a phone works mostly as you’d expect; @eviltrout will follow up on some hardcoded <canvas> element sizes.

We also want to make the first run after install be a full screen login prompt, to narrow the possible confusion any new admins might have about what they need to do next – log in!

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Full screen first run login prompt is now in

(Ignore the email protected thing, that is cloudflare being “helpful”)

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