How do I turn off "This is the first time XYZ has posted — let’s welcome them to our community!"

I can see it’s their first post because there’s a “1” next to the number of posts for them.

How do I turn this message off?

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This is something that Discourse is showing up for everyone on their first post. AFAIK you can’t disable it.

Can you describe a bit more why there is a problem with that?

Thanks!

It takes up screen real estate and is a duplicate of information that is already available elsewhere.

Also, any irrelevant message wastes all visitors time - everyone reads that line of text, and then realises it’s just a duplicate of existing information.

Perhaps it can be handled via internationalisation? Americans might like that sort of fluffy duplicate message, people from elsewhere might not.

To be clear - this isn’t saying that we shouldn’t take time to welcome newcomers into the OSM community (anyone familiar with anything I’ve written elsewhere will know that I’m always banging on about how it’s a good idea to do that, e.g. by writing “hello and welcome” changeset discussion comments) but a message on every “first post” that duplicates information on the line immediately below is unnecessary.

Oh come on - are you seriously suggesting that a small counter that hardly anybody will notice is somehow a replacement for a small banner actively drawing people’s attention to the fact that somebody is a new user?

Please accept that this forum runs on new software and will be different in places, but those design decisions are made with good reason and if you’re just going to demand that every feature be turned off then we might as well give up now and just go back to the old stuff.

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We are using a new tool, which has some design decisions we haven’t taken but overall we are using it because we like it and a lot of these behaviors can be customized from the user or site settings.

Obviously there is going to be a few things people might not like that much, but the overall experience is what’s important.

Good thing is that you can always follow the forums via email (And enable the mailing list mode) or rss if that’s less noisy for you.

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I thought the reason why we weren’t happy on using the “old stuff” in the future was that it was no longer supported?

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That’s certainly part of it, but it doesn’t mean we’re trying to make this into a bit for bit clone of it.

Maybe the state of the art in UI and UX design has moved on since then? or even more likely may OSQA was never that good to start with…

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I second this.
As you know might know from other posts, I’m in favor of removing unnecessary, trivial and redundant notifications wherever possible and getting straight to the content.

If some people like it, make it optional.

You talk like this is software we have written and we can just make arbitrary changes to it!

That is not the case - this is a third party software product that we can only use within it’s design parameters.

Strange. I was under the impression that discourse is open source under a GPL license.

So feel free to open a pull request to add this feature to it, then you can come back and ask us to enable it.

What you don’t get to do is treat the operations team as your paid software engineering department that you can demand do work on your behalf.

We have quite enough to do running things without getting involved in developing them as well!

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Without doubt this is a point but to my understanding none of the above comments showed any disrespect towards the operations team.

Maybe I am wrong but I understand your earlier replies

as well as nukeadors comment

as some kind of statement saying: “This banner thing is part of the modern UI and UX design created by good reason and we like ist … way better than the old fashioned stuff …”

In reply to that I understand “If some people like it, make it optional” just as a legitimate suggestion, not as a disrespectful demand towards the operations team.

No worries @Map_HeRo

I think there is currently a need/caution for controlling the scope of work on all the things we need to implement with these forums and some requests that fall in the category of “changing how Discourse implements X” are currently out of the scope.

Having said that, that doesn’t mean that if we have a good ideas to improve Discourse, we can’t direct people to the discourse dev forums to request that improvement.

We will probably find things along the way to make the experience better for everyone, and I’m sure the Discourse dev team will be more than happy to get feedback on their product.

Right now, it is builtin and not optional in Discourse, something that Discourse (new) users may not know, while admins know because they could not find the checkbox to make it optional (I’ve search for it on the instances I’m administering myself).

Some feature requests can be quickly setup by adding a plugin or tune some parameters, but to make the welcome reminder banner optional it means someone had to write some new code, and this is not in the scope of ops and admins, but dev people and won’t be available in the short term.

You’re annoyed by this banner but can’t code yourself ? Find a dev that is annoyed too :wink:

I am fully aware of that and moreover I surely do esteem the work members of the various teams are contributing to the implementation of the new forum. I just felt that TomH may have overreacted a bit in this case and tried to put the different opinions into balance … :slightly_smiling_face:

Did not want to push this issue further ahead as I am aware there are many much more important issues to be handled at the time being.

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No-code solution:

  • with uBlock-origin… hide “.new-user.post-notice”
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An admin can change css settings on Discourse, essentially removing clutter on the UI for everyone.

More details: How to make CSS changes on your site - admins - Discourse Meta