Howdy all. I find myself want to have a way to remind people about useful features or community etiquette tips. A couple of ways I can envision this happening are:
A. Modal popup with a random “tip of the day”
B. Being able to Private Message the entire community a couple of times per month
Does Discourse have any way to achieve either of those or some comparable way of doing disseminating tips like this?
Thx!
I believe you could achieve that with a new bannered topic every day.
Interesting, I’ve never tried a bannered topic but I’ll look into it. Thx!
Good idea! And those topics could be timed and published automatically, so you can set them up in anvance!
Or can you? I’m not sure if timed topics can be automatically pinned globally…
I have been thinking about this for some time. The purpose would be letting the members of my forum know about Discourse less-known features, that can be handy from time to time, or for certain users. Perhaps by publishing a topic once or twice a month.
It is not especially about “new users tips”; I know there’s documentation for this. It’s more aimed at regular members who have their habits, always use forums the same way regardless of the software, and thus might miss Discourse-exclusive (or not) certain features.
For example:
It’s easy to miss this kind of features, if you’re not actively looking for them. I’m sure there are plenty.
Making a list could be helpful.
I’m interested in this too. I do some variety of it on Facebook for information relevant to our community’s subject: publish regular posts with reminders. It’s moderately satisfying.
With discourse, I’d been thinking of doing this through automation with private messages, but bannered topics seems interesting—if it can be automated.
I did such thing using auto bumping, but it annoyed active users so much, I stopped it.
My opinion is we should hide as much options as possible, as toolbar of the composer. The UI of regular user should be as minimalistic as possible.
That comes from my struggle of getting people move from Facebook to Discourse — a campain I’m loosing big time. After couple years I have around 1500 lurkers every day and only half dozen writers and couple dozen login users; compared to a 27K active Facebook group.
I’ve asked why they don’t like to use Discourse. If we don’t care boring ”everybody is in Facebook”, the most common reason is the forum looks very messy and difficult. Lurkers come in using a shared link, and almost never continue to login or frontpage/latest. If I try to stay on topic that means at same time only already active ones would and will be the only ones who see such naggers. And they don’t need those.
I agree completely. This one of the strengths of Facebook – and also, as it’s an “all-in-one” platform, even group members who are not very active in the group are likely to be active enough on Facebook in general that they feel comfortable with the familiar interface.
This is one of the reasons I’m planning to do this with DMs and automation. I also want automation to “find” users who have a certain profile (e.g. not giving insulin to their cat yet) who haven’t posted in a while to send them a DM to see how things are going. I think that between automation and groups to “sort” users there is a way to make “content-nudges” like this work.
When it comes to using Discourse, I think the same can be applied, but this will only work with people who have managed to make an account.
Sad to hear that! I don’t know if you read my (too long, I agree) topic Migrating from Facebook: specific challenges, and some thoughts – I really think that looking at how we “fail” to migrate people from Facebook can be a good tool to see how to make Discourse simpler to get started with, both for community builders and members.
Yes. I’m in the process of trying to tidy up as well as I can so that people don’t get scared when they first arrive. I think there is a case for a kind of “bare-bones” theme for newbie members which simply hides a lot of the functionality, and which can be then “switched” to a theme giving access to everything once people are comfortable enough. There’s a bunch of stuff I’d remove if I try to think of an “easy experience” for new users from Facebook.
I’m now off-topic, but discourse could offer a “simple” mode that hides a bunch of features, aimed specially for this kind of communities. Members could then unlock the hidden features from there user profile, and be notified of this option after reaching a certain trust level.
That would ensure a smooth onboarding for communities not used to traditional forums.
It’s not the first time something similar had been asked btw.
Exactly. This.
And, why not: also for community builders. A kind of MVP for starting out. Research would probably be needed to figure out what needs to be included in the « mini » version.
It’s like… I’ve started learning to play Bridge. Bridge is super complicated, just to be able to start playing. So they designed « mini-bridge », which is much easier to actually learn to play and is great for « onboarding » future Bridge players.
Feel free to add your voice and vote, or create a new Feature topic for this if the purpose is different. I feel it might deserve a new one, if you have a clear idea on why (context is quite clear here, it’s mostly about migrations from social media) and how such a feature could be implemented.
And also because
In what we’re discussing right now, I feel it would be more beneficial to not force-feed “advanced” features to users. Most would just keep the simple interface and that’s all. They wouldn’t need more. Power users could enable the option to have a more complete experience.
I’m very interested to see some detailed drawings or mockups of a theme showing your visions of specifically what this user interface would look like, in your ideal, most simplified use-case for frictionless onboarding for novice users?
There’s a lot of really good stuff in there, thanks!
I was thinking about this a bit while I was out, I’ll add my thoughts to the other topic as it seems more on topic (!) there.