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: