For what it’s worth, 3 users other than @downey and myself have completed the tutorial. They were all truly new users that would have received a DM to get started.
I love the concept and I think the parts that involve doing “normal” things like using emoji and markdown are great and very useful. Some of the fancier ones confused me and I do agree that starting with bookmarks is puzzling. If I didn’t know what the bot was for, I’m not sure I would have gone through with it the first time. Also, some parts like the capybara one left me with more questions than answers!
No, I can confirm that new users on SSO sites do get the discobot messages.
Glad to see all this hackery around alerting users to discobot! Yours is fun, @lognaturel!
Returning to the OP for this topic written 3 weeks ago… sadly not a single new user has completed the new user narrative and secured the certified badge. It’s only myself and the moderators I nudged and nagged to complete the track who have the badge so far.
edit: ooh, and I’m lovin’ your unicorn. Very pretty.
And my team do the same. I asked them only to write the sentence “bot-name start new user” somewhere to see what was going on without explaining anything, and all of them reported that the bot send a PM…and stop…
No one has put the bookmark because nobody understood the purpose for doing that.
So I had to explain what’s the purpose of the bot and what would happen if they put the bookmark to the message.
And with infinite sadness I understand that (at least until I will be rewriting the original post from the bot so much clearer) the welcome message is the only secure way for my new users to understand how Discourse works.
I think this is more about human nature than the way the 'bot works, or what initial text it uses.
Put yourself in the mind of a typical new user: You’ve got some question you want answered, and you just found this site which seems to be the perfect place to ask your question, so you register and login. You’re still focused on that question, so much so that you will click on anything that stands between you and your asking that question, just to get it out of the way.
How many people actually lay out the parts of their new IKEA furniture and check that everything is there, then read the instructions through to the end carefully before they start putting it together?
Absolutetly.
That’s why I asked to my team to test the bot, all people that are very familiar with Discourse and all people that are very familiar with bots (because we have 2 bots on our chat and 1 of them is very similar to discobot).
My concern is that if also my team don’t understand how discobot works I’m pretty sure that my new users don’t understand it too.
I fully agree with you.
In my experience I can’t say how many people really read the welcome message until the end, not even when they like the message or they reply with “thanks”.
But for now I only can say that no one reply to discobot.
As I said above my next step is to entirely customize the OP from the bot and see if new users start at least the basic tutorial.
I’m just waiting the weekly translations update from Transifex to Discourse.
I understand what you’re saying, but when people buy something from IKEA they’re also forced to works in some way (maybe not the correct way initially) and learn how to put the pieces together.
And if they go again to IKEA they have now learned how to organize themselves.
No one here can force a user to do the same with discobot.
And probably the initial approach of the bot is basically wrong if some admins have decided to make changes in the OP.
Note that I’m not asking for a bot review, it’s only my personal opinion, and since I can change the text as I want and I can choose what message he must send (tutorials or welcome message), I have no problem using discobot.
The bot won’t be all things for all mods working with all userbases. There may be some aspects which can be tweaked or expanded, but it works in a fuzzy requirements space.
It’s a lot better than a wall o text, or a category with user guides which need constant revision each time some part of Discourse changes, or mods constantly needing to scan the forum for random “How do I replace my water heater on my own and how do I write Italics?” posts.
The reason I used the IKEA example is that if you look at the instructions closely you will be impressed at just how well designed they are as a set of instructions, but people still manage to get things completely wrong and start cutting bits that don’t fit… people are like that.
I just posted an announcement about the bot in our User Guides section, so far I haven’t mentioned the bot, so only new signups would have noticed the bot. Perhaps some of the existing users will run the tutorial.
At the end of the day - you can lead a horse to water…
I also noticed that about 50 percent of my new users don’t even read the bot’s message (which is quite significant, considering that the only way to get rid of the black screen is to open the user menu which shows a link to the new message). So I figured that “Greetings!” is perhaps not the most intriguing title for a message. I changed it to “Here are some tips and tricks!” Let’s see if it helps…
Skip the welcome, to start with. “Welcome” signals: not interesting.
The rest is a bit long. I’d also make it more vague. In your example, you already lost anyone who doesn’t care about manuals. How about “7 vital tips for your success on this forum” Or “7 things you didn’t know about this forum” (Replace 7 with the number of steps in the tutorial). Or be inspired by the headlines of those click bait websites…
Clickbait would definitely not work with my users. These are car enthusiasts, most of them want to know the correct torque for a specific bolt, or something that technical. They don’t like vague.
Perhaps our forum is a bit different… we don’t have to “sell” it much. People arrive because of word of mouth, or a google search which reveals that the concrete info they want is on our site.
“Quick introduction to forum usage” would be more like it.
Not every click bait works for everyone, but everyone falls for some.
Of course, “You won’t believe how this mother lost 7 pounds in 3 days” won’t work for you Jag lovers. And it wouldn’t be a good idea even for those who would click on it because it has nothing to do with what the bot has to offer.
What I was referring to was this kind of formula that you can find all over the web (e.g. here):
Number or Trigger word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise
So translated to our situation, that might be something like
7 tricks to get you started in less than 10 minutes
How does one access the “new user tutorial” if they are a long time member who was imported into Discourse and never received the notification about it?
