Incorporate discobot into our instance 🤖

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#1

Work has been happening upstream to replace the default welcome PM with a robot, and this has now been included as an official plugin.

It would be nice to make this robot our own, adapting the flow to best suit our instance, and include a few easter eggs while we’re at it.

We should also see if we can make our robot the sender of all automated messages, by changing the site contact username setting, to have a consistency from where messages like these are sent.

GitHub issue: https://github.com/mozilla/discourse/issues/53

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#2

Leo, excellent ideas. Did you add this to Mozilla’s Discourse Backlog?

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#3

Yep, it’s here:

#4

I thought it wouldn’t be, but as it turns out this was automatically pulled in on our last update.

So I’ve done a few things to make discobot more Mozilla (I hadn’t realised that poster was all the way back from Firefox 3, man I feel old), and not lose anything we had in our previous welcome PM.

Here you can see what the new user narrative looks like. I changed the opening message a little from the default, to include links to topics on how to subscribe to categories/topics and how to set up a mailing list experience.

Other than that, the narrative is the same as what we get by default in Discourse. While we can’t actually change what triggers the next post from discobot (without writing a whole heap of code), we could change the help text in each step to be more Mozilla: suggesting different links be pasted, quotes be quoted and pictures be liked, but that’s not really work I can prioritise at the moment.

Happy to gather any ideas here, though!

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#5

With an assumption that for some users, Mozilla Discourse will be either (a) their first Mozilla-focused discussion experience or (b) the most engaging Mozilla-focused discussion experience …

… maybe one of the steps should briefly, in plain English (or localised), put Mozilla Discourse in the context of some of the other resources. A few things come to mind:

More generally:

– but given the countdown to Firefox 57, my gut tells me that it might be nice for the bot to be not too general; nice for the bot to provide orientation for users and developers who are (or will be) affected by the change.

Cross reference

Mozilla bug 1309226 - Update /about/forums/ to include Discourse forums

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Awareness of mozillaZine