Narrative bot settings and texts

As I’m playing around with Discobot settings, I wanted to mention that I find it quite unintuitive that under “plugins” I have a “Narrative Bot” page with a bunch of settings, but when I want to edit things like the welcome message it users, I need to head over to site texts and figure out what to write in the search bar to find the message.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have all that in one place?

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For me, it makes sense that settings and texts are separated. One place is to enable a feature and how it works, and the other place is for editing the texts from the interface.

Would you also expect to be able to change all the texts, for example, the assign plugin adds on its settings page? If all of the more than 100 texts would also appear there, spotting the relevant settings would be way more difficult. The site text page with its search interface seems the better place for editing the texts.

I think the only place where settings and texts are currently mixed is the config page for the welcome banner. And in my opinion, that is quite confusing, because there is no indicator which language you edit. Changing the texts there looks just like editing a setting. But there is a major difference: changing a setting changes it for everyone, but changing the text only changes it in your current interface language. The interface makes it easy to miss that. It doesn’t indicate that you edited the text only for one language, and users preferring another language won’t see the information you added.

Maybe it’s not that much of a problem for the welcome banner (though it’s sad when admins don’t care about offering the same information to all their users), but I think for the tutorial this would be even worse. Probably not in your case if you disable allow user locale to force everyone to use the same language, but by default users are allowed to choose their preferred interface language, and I think then admins should take into account providing a similar experience to all their users. Discovering later that you didn’t get the information because of your language doesn’t feel great. Just like it always felt a little strange that the search banner on Meta only told non-English users to search before posting :woman_shrugging:

That’s why I prefer places where it’s very obvious that you edit something that depends on the user’s interface language and the site text page supports that, while mixing it with site settings and not showing a language dropdown results in the opposite.

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