How to introduce people to get familar to Discourse?

Support
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You see, if we want to let people come to use Discourse, we have to achieve a few goals:

  1. Make people familar with Discourse structure. Different useage of different buttons.

  • Make people familar with Markdown or the edit bar:

  • This is a phone era. How to make people easily login to Discourse to read and chat? There is an app called “Discourse” now. So I think it quite important to let people know the app.

  • And, that is an app container which can contain many forums based on Discourse. So should we make different lists of forums for people to sellect?

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Simply sign up for any Discourse and read the first PM from discobot. You can try this yourself at https://try.discourse.org sign up there, and watch and see what happens.

So this is already handled in current versions of Discourse 1.8 or later, nothing else to do.

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I actually saw this – nice work @team!!!

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The Bot really is a stroke of genius.

The first couple of days after we went live with Discourse I spent a lot of time more or less doing what Discobot does, but I was only able to interact with a small number of users at any given time. It also didn’t help that I was myself completely new to Discourse.

For an example of what one of those dialogues looked like, see here. Fortunately the user and I ended up creating a sort of Socratic dialogue which ended up being a user guide.

The Bot is a lot less labour intensive.

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Let us know if you have any ideas for further improvement based on your experiences; very open to this as long as it is based on observed user behaviors!

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If your question was directed to me, Jeff, then the problem is… I’ve become the wrong person to ask. I’ve worked with Discourse for long enough now that I’ve either figured it out, or I know where to look to find it out. (You have to admit, I ask fewer noob questions than back around Christmas.)

I am anything other than a fan of online surveys, but in this case, a survey for new Discourse users and moderators arriving here might be a good way to discover things that the Bot needs to cover. Catch them while what they don’t know is still fresh in their minds, so to say.

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Perhaps, but observing how your users interact with the bot and Discourse, and thinking of small ways to smooth out that experience, is always valuable.

We have been doing this for four years now and there are still things we are figuring out that I wish we had known at the start! More people, more users, more perspectives…

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