Welcome new users with customized trust level promotion messages

[nolo (Manuel)]

The default on-boarding journey is set up using the Discourse narrative bot. It’s a great feature in general, but at times you might not want to welcome new users with a bot. This howto lists the steps involved to set up on-boarding with the trust level messages sent by the site contact user.

Set up the site contact user

All automated messages are sent by the site contact user. It’s the system user by default. You can change this by modifying site contact username in Settings:

Then set up this user or modify the system user, so it shows up the way you like (username, Full Name, avatar, groups and flairs, contact options,…). E.g:

Modify the default discobot settings

Filter Settings for narrative bot and disable the welcome post. Probably also disable public replies:

Customize system messages

Discourse sends out messages for each trust level promotion. The messages can be customized in admin/customize/site_texts. The variable names are:

• Trust Level 1 message
  system_messages.welcome_tl1_user.text_body_template
system_messages.welcome_tl1_user.subject_template
• Trust Level 2 message
  system_messages.tl2_promotion_message.text_body_template
system_messages.tl2_promotion_message.subject_template
• Trust Level 3 message
  lounge_welcome.body
lounge_welcome.title

Customize the narrative bot messages

If you want users to still engage with the discobot tutorial, you should mention in the tl1 message that it can be triggered by replying @discobot start tutorial.

Then you should probably adjust the initial message of the bot. The variables for this message are:

• Discobot hello message
  discourse_narrative_bot.new_user_narrative.hello.message
discourse_narrative_bot.new_user_narrative.hello.title

Time the on-boarding

With this setup new users won’t receive an immediate notification after they signed up. Instead the first message is the tl1 welcome message (default title: Thanks for spending time with us). You can time this message by adjusting tl1 requires in settings:

Conclusion

And we’re good to go! Now users receive the first welcome message from the site contact user you defined:

And with whatever user setup and message text you modified:

[tpetrov (Toni Petrov)]

@nolo

Filter Settings for narrative bot and disable the welcome post.

Why do we need to disable the welcome bot? Just so that users will not receive a message from discobot or is it really required in order for the custom contact to work?

[nolo (Manuel)]

You don’t disable the narrative bot with that specific setting. You disable the welcome post being sent by the bot. And yes, that’s sort of necessary if you don’t want to send out welcoming messages twice.

Disabling other bot features is not. If you want the bot to spell out what else it can do, you can always type @discobot display help in a message or post.

[tpetrov (Toni Petrov)]

@nolo

And yes, that’s sort of necessary if you don’t want to send out welcoming messages twice.

Hmm, do you mean the other welcoming message is the one for TL1? But usually users start from TL0, so they will not receive this message immediately.

[nolo (Manuel)]

Yes, that’s actually one of the two motivations for this set-up:

• not having a bot welcoming new users
• not sending out an immediate message that directs users away from your main forum content on signup

I should probably state that in the first post… @team, could this be a wiki post?

I think ideally these considerations wouldn’t be bundled and you could just pick a user that sends all welcoming/onboarding messages (tl0, tl1, tl2).

Another more ideal solution to welcome tl0 - but not direct them away from the main content - could actually be a “tl0 welcoming banner”. That’s a bit fiddly to setup as such… but could be a good use case for a simple component

[tpetrov (Toni Petrov)]

Got it - makes sense now

[JonathanShaw]

@nolo

disable the welcome post

How? By setting discourse narrative bot welcome post delay to 0?

[nolo (Manuel)]

When you filter settings for narrative bot then there’s a dedicated setting: disable discourse narrative bot welcome post.

[th21]

@nolo

system_messages.welcome_tl1_user.text_body_template

Can we preview the message? Or we can only see it by creating a test user and granting the user trust level to see the customized message?

[nolo (Manuel)]

@th21

Can we preview the message? Or we can only see it by creating a test user and granting the user trust level to see the customized message?

Yes, at least I’m also only aware of doing it that way. You can preview email templates, but there seems to be no backend option to preview system messages.

[Shirly_Nowak]

@nolo

Discourse sends out messages for each trust level promotion. The messages can be customized in admin/customize/site_texts. The variable names are:

• Trust Level 3 message
  lounge_welcome.body
lounge_welcome.title

Hi @nolo , what happens if I disable the lounge? That category isn’t available for members in my community, so these 2 texts don’t seem to be available for customizing. Does that mean that in my case when a member achieves TL3 he won’t get a welcome message?