Onboarding: Discobot, automated messages, other options?

You can customize the texts like any site text (Customize text in Discourse)

“narrative_bot” is the name of the plugin. But there are more than 50 results, so you won’t see all by searching for that. So for the tutorial for new users you can search for “narrative_bot.new” and for the advanced tutorial you can search for “narrative_bot.advanced”

You can not change the trigger discobot expects for sending the next step of the tutorial. So you cannot change it to teach users a different workflow. But you can customize it so it also explains stuff you want users so know while they still do what it expects. For example, as long as there is a quote in the reply the tutorial will continue. No matter if you use the default text by discobot and your users quote that or if you ask them to create a topic in a specific category[1] and ask them to quote that post in the tutorial.

Different welcome messages based on data the user entered during sign up are possible too. There is an automation to add users to groups based on custom fields and there is an automation script to send a message to a user when they are added to a group (and you can configure a delay, so more messages a few days later are possible too). (Groups can be visible only to admins if you don’t want your users to see them).

There are 2 options within the discobot tutorial: the message that is inviting the user to the tutorial and a general welcome message. But both would be the same for all users. So the automation might be the better choice for you. The fact that you can choose the sender, so you receive the replies to those messages might also be helpful.
Users can also message discobot for the tutorial if they want, so you could tell them about the tutorial and how to start it within your personal welcome message[2].


  1. Creating a link to start a new topic with pre-filled information might be helpful for that ↩︎

  2. similar to the new topic link you can also create links that open a prefilled composer for a personal message ↩︎

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