Welcoming new users

Gemeenschap
1

I’d like to make it possible for community members to welcome new users.

The relatively new Chat functionality seems ideal for this.

The idea is to encourage (by example) community members to @mention new members and encourage them to introduce themselves. This in-turn may prompt the community member to encourage the new member to post a question, make a post in our show-and-tell channel, or invite them to attend a community event.

I have two barriers:

  1. I’m not sure how community members can be notified of new signups?
    As an admin I can see this pretty clearly - but I’m not sure how regular users can see this.

  2. I’m not clear on the behaviour of chat if the user has signed off? Do they get an email notifying them? (I should know this but I’m not sure)

Any advice or guidance is greatly appreciated.

Stephen
(An admin on the Racket community discord - Racket the an open source programming language not the game)

2 likes
2

there are probably more than one way (i can think of 3) to do what you are intending, but i think i would do this:

if you have automation enabled, you could schedule a daily job to run a data explorer for new sign ups and then pm to a group or trust_level (say TL3 regulars).

this query will give you the new sign-up for the last day:

-- Counts all new users from yesterday
SELECT
  (CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '1 day')::DATE AS sign_up_date,
  COUNT(u.id) AS new_users_yesterday
FROM users AS u
WHERE
  u.created_at >= (CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '1 day') AND u.created_at < CURRENT_DATE

this will do the last 24 hours from time of query run:

-- Counts new users in the last rolling 24-hour period
SELECT
  COUNT(u.id) AS new_users_last_24_hours
FROM users AS u
WHERE
  u.created_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL '24 hours'

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OR

  • use automation to post a query to a secure topic that only a group can see and are set to watching (similar to above) - this might be a slightly less intrusive method than PM.
  • you could configure a chat webhook and use the user created event

personally i would use personal messages (or dedicated topic) for this, since chat settings for email notification are set in the user preferences at /my/preferences/email

Screenshot 2026-05-04 at 10.47.12 AM
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1 like
3

Thanks @Lilly but our community benefits from the generous free hosting offered for open source projects, and quite reasonably neither cron nor SQL query access is available.

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4

yea that is an important detail that should likely be in the OP that would have saved me some typing. i don’t know if that free open source plan gives access to chat webhooks but you could try.

2 likes
5

Lesson learnt for the next time.
Look on the bright side - your excellent response will no-doubt help someone else and populate dataset for the AI.

3 likes
6

I think your users could check the new members of the TL0 group. The group is not visible to them on the groups page, but the link works https://meta.discourse.org/g/trust_level_0?asc=false&order=added_at. You could put that link in the sidebar (it doesn’t work for logged-out users, so using Discourse Group Sidebar Menus to show it only for logged-in users or a special group of trusted users might make sense).

Edit: Maybe it’s better to use the TL1 group because those users have already spent some time reading on the forum.

5 likes