Will the Discobot tutorial work with flags disabled?

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Has the disabling of flags been tested with the Discobot tutorial? A few years ago we hid some flags with CSS because they were not applicable, however the Discobot tutorial soft locked because of this. At some point the tutorial asked the user to flag a message, but in our instance they couldn’t because we’d hidden that flag. Sadly we had to disable the tutorial.

If Discobot doesn’t soft lock when only the “it’s illegal” flag is enabled, then we might be able to re-enable the tutorial by adopting this version :slight_smile:

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I think you can use a similar workaround, like when you Disable Likes
So, instead of asking the user to flag the post, you can ask them to reply ‘skip’

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Ahh you’re right. You even told me that last time :sweat_smile:

I’ll put it on the todo list and give it a try at some point :slight_smile:

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Good catch, Tristan! There does appear to be a small bug here. I’m not sure what the answer is and if we need to do anything about it.

I tested this and see that the flagging step does still work even if the user does not have access to flagging (e.g. is not in a group specified in chat message flag allowed groups).

That said, discobot does gets stuck if the “inappropriate” flag has been disabled.

If another flag is chosen, it appears to work but discobot will respond to educate the user to use the correct flag:

Oh no, my nasty post hasn’t been flagged as inappropriate yet. :worried: Can you flag it as inappropriate using the flag ? Don’t forget to use the show more button to reveal more actions for each post.

But then if you try to flag again with a different flag, the tutorial then gets stuck again. :sob:

After a while Discobot will reply again:

Hey @tobiaseigen, just checking in because I haven’t heard from you in a while.

  • To continue, reply to me any time.
  • If you’d like to skip this step, say skip.
  • To start over, say start tutorial.

If you’d rather not, that’s OK too. I’m a robot. You won’t hurt my feelings. :sob:

Replying with “skip” at this point lets you continue the tutorial.

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This is interesting - I was not aware of this case. Are there more ways to break the discobot tutorial that you’ve discovered?

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IIRC, on the forum I help run, one boxing detection randomly just doesn’t work, so we’ve edited a message letting them know they can skip into that step too.

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That feels familiar. I suspect it’s the flag in question for us too. Inappropriate doesn’t really apply for us so it was one of the ones we decided to hide.

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Thanks, Tristan! Would it help if we generalized this step, so any flag could be used? Or would it be acceptable if we just skipped the step if the “it’s inappropriate” reason were disabled?

We are looking for the smallest possible change we can make here, because tweaks to discobot tend to be difficult to test and create more bugs that then also need squashing!

Also more generally… do you teach your site members about features like flagging, and how you expect them to be used, using other means? How many people complete the discobot tutorial in your community?

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That’s a known bug Discobot didn't recognize link in tutorial

But discobot suggests skipping after 2 fails without any customization:

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Unfortunately, as a poorly programmed bot, I can’t quite understand that one. :frowning:

You can try again, or if you’d like to skip this step, say skip. Otherwise, to start over, say start tutorial.

Tutorial:

  1. Bookmark: Remove “bookmark” from post menu, set max bookmarks per day to 0
  2. Onebox: Set max oneboxes per post to 0 (after some posts where it fails it suggests to use skip)
  3. Mention: Set max mentions per post to 0 (replying without an @mention also triggers the skip information after 2 posts, but who would try that?)
  4. Quote: Disabling default other enable quoting breaks a part of “Select the text of whichever ↑ quote you prefer, and then press the Quote button that pops up over your selection – or the Reply button at the bottom of this post.” because there is no quote button, but replying works.
  5. Image upload: Removing all? extensions from authorized extensions or disabling embedded media post allowed groups

Good news: disabling enable emoji does not break the tutorial, the step is skipped.

Advanced tutorial:

  1. Edit: edit post allowed groups which exclude the user or removing “Edit” from post menu, also a very short (tl2) post edit time limit makes it challenging
  2. Delete: Removing “delete” from post menu, set max post deletions per day and/or max post deletions per minute to 0
  3. Undelete: delete removed posts after set to 0 makes it more difficult, because the post disappears on reload.

I haven’t checked the next steps

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IIRC, at least two people complained after it failed once, and didn’t reach that point.

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I think either of these solutions would be ok. I would lean towards the generalisation, so users are still guided through the process of flagging and encouraged to do it - which is an important feature of internal communities who need to catch confidential information as quickly as possible.

Yes, we have a section in our confidentiality guidelines which demonstrates this. Users must read the confidentiality guidelines to gain topic creation permissions.

I also added this at the bottom of our “lessons learned” template:

Confidentiality Reminder

If you see something that you think might breach confidentiality or other requirements, simply flag it, describe what you think should be modified or removed and we’ll take a look.

I can’t give you a concrete number, but before it soft-locked I think we had about 10% of users going through the tutorial. Might even have been more. That was with zero promotion or encouragement of the functionality on our side.

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