I’m not sure how best to go about onboarding my members. Discobot seems like a good start but I’d like to also include “community specific” things in the tutorials (related to the subject of our community), is that possible?
Otherwise, I’d looked into using an automation plugin to send a private message to users when they join, and another a couple of days later, etc. But it’s not very interactive.
Here’s how I’d like things to work – is this doable, and what would the most straightforward way to do this with Discourse?
new user receives a custom “welcome message” with some pointers on how to get started in the community (support group for diabetic cat owners, so the message would be some reassurance, a few key points to pay attention to so we can catch critical emergencies, an invitation to post in the welcome zone and some pointers to useful documents for beginners)
depending on the option a new user selected when signing up, welcome message could be different
after N days, another message (and so on, at certain set intervals of time after the user joined)
it would be great to have some kind of interactive tutorial, like discobot does for learning to use discourse, but for our topic: e.g. mission #1 is create a special topic in a given category for your cat; mission #2 is fill in your profile with a bunch of info we need; mission #3 is start filling in the checklist for the emergency kit we recommend, etc.
Thanks!
Oh, and regarding Discobot: is there a place were we can simply see all the texts/messages to go through them and revise/edit them? It’s super cumbersome in the admin interface, particularly if you don’t know what to look for because you don’t know what exists!
“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].
Why are you stuck? How many results do you get for “narrative_bot.new”?
Finding texts is easiest by searching for the text you want to change. So, to change the first message, you can search for “I am only a robot” (or the French version of that). This is also explained in Customizing Discobot for your site.
Then you could search for the next one. Completing the tutorial and then searching for the texts from it can be helpful because then you know the order of the messages.
You can also find similar texts based on the key. For example, you take discourse_narrative_bot.new_user_narrative.hello.message and remove a part of it to search for that. If you remove “message” from the key, you will also find the title. If you also remove “hello,”, you will find more messages than the “hello” message.
You can also find all texts on GitHub. Most plugins have a client and a server file. The messages are in the server file, but I find it quite difficult to get keys from those files. I prefer Crowdin for searching through more texts than the Discourse interface returns, but usually searching and using the keys is enough.
Do you allow your users to select the interface language in their preferences? Then, customizing text in only one language will result in users with a different interface language missing the information you added. An example of that is the about page here on Meta, where only users who see Meta in English see the email address to message moderators.
The message you create with the automations plugin will be sent as you write it. It’s the same for all users, no matter what language they prefer.
I can’t say how relevant this is for your community, but perhaps you could disable the language selection for users before inviting them to the forum.
