Oh we definitely had a few “what is this thing?” reports when we deployed it the first time, for sure, but nothing that is ongoing enough to classify as A Serious Problem…
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Maybe the hello message from discobot to site staff should be different. “Hello, don’t freak out! I’m from a plugin that will help your users understand how to use Discourse…”
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tbh I was also freaked out when I first saw it.
If you put people in a new environment, they don’t notice everything, they don’t read everything, and they do not remember everything they noticed, saw, or read.
No, of course not. And if we did, it would have been worth mentioning when opening this topic 
But let’s not keep going back and forth about this. It’s just a small percentage of our users - but enough to see a trend here, and I thought it was worthwhile to mention on meta.
When we find some time, we’ll submit a PR and move the users with id < 0 to a ‘system’ category in the overview and give them a different icon.
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Finishing the PR, just wanted some feedback.
I’ve chosen the rocket as an icon and it overrides the shield icon for admin and moderator for all users with id < 0
This also happens in a post,
Is this something you agree with, and/or do you prefer another icon?
So:
- in the admin/users menu there is a new category called ’ System’ and system users are removed from the ‘Staff’ category
- there is a link from the dashboard
- in the posts, user card and user profile a rocket is visible instead of a shield
- in the user screen for admins there is a System? line below Moderator
Let me know what you think.
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I’d probably find something like fa-cogs more intuitive.
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That was my second choice, but I think too many people associate it with “settings” ?
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@sam indicated that discobot was appearing a lot in the search tracking here on meta, plus this topic… so I figured a whole blog post was warranted to better document / explain this:
As that gets more Google Juice™ hopefully it can help anyone searching the public web for information about this discobot user.
(I still think that people who don’t bother to visit the user profile to find out more about a user are a little bit nuts, but whatevs!)
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This fell off our plate during the summer… is the PR mentioned above still welcome, and if so, what icon would you prefer (rocket, cog, or something else)?
Not interested, thanks!