New Member Welcome Message

luetage

I believe everyone on this forum has seen this (or a very similar) post before:

Welcome to the Community. Here are a few links for your bookmarks that you may find useful:

Help on Feature Requests

Vivaldi Help

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Vivaldi's Business Model

It’s a helpful welcome message for new members, but I have a few problems with it.

Only members, who post in the forum get this via a reply to their first message.
They only get treated to it in case someone notices that they are new.
They could be a lurker for a very long time and already know their way around the forum / Vivaldi in general, in which case the message is superfluous.
Everyone else who happens upon the topic will read the copypasta too. There are literally hundreds of them around.

My proposal is to have a Vivaldi employee write up something similar, maybe with a few additions on how to operate and setup the nodebb forum settings and profile and anything else that comes to mind. Then send the whole thing automatically to the inbox of new members. Advantage: Everyone is guaranteed to receive the welcome and will receive it only once. I think this should be doable and would make a lot of sense.

Pesala

@luetage said in New Member Welcome Message:

Copypasta

It's a copy and pasted block of text usually posted on a message board to troll newer users and as an inside joke between older users. Copypasta can usually be found posted in a discussion about any subject, and will usually be intended to draw out newer users into responding negatively to it, much to the amusement of more veteran users. (Urban Dictionary)

No, it is not copypasta.

If a Vivaldi employee writes up something similar to send to new members, they won't read it or if they do, by the time that they post on the forum they may have forgotten about it.

Having the links posted as a reply to a specific post means that they are immediately available to the OP, and to lurkers or others who may not yet be too good at finding their way around the forum.

I usually open the user's Profile to check that they are new to the forum, and that neither Gwen nor I have already replied to an earlier post that they made. Perhaps you should create a note of your own to make sure that new users get relevant information about CSS mods, for example

luetage

@Pesala Come on, don’t take offense at the word copypasta. I never looked up its supposed original meaning and it wasn’t intended to sound negative. To me a copypasta is a wall of text that someone pastes as reply. And I don’t think you are typing this out each time.

However, my points remain. Some way to get the message across other than finding new members by chance should be found, because they need the info before they ever post a message. We could also put this at the front page of the forum for everyone to see all the time. This is something for the forum maintainers to decide.

Hadden89

@luetage With inbox you mean as chat message?
Such message could be helpful as new users will see a notification with useful links and can decide to read of forget it.
Better with a bot as then people will reply on forums.
An info box is fine too as long is discard-able as could be also considered a wall of text or a copy pasta.

luetage

@Hadden89 This is the idea ^^
How the message is sent or presented to the members is of course debatable, but it should be automated.

Hadden89

@luetage And the box shouldn't be linked with cookies or it may become annoying. A chat bot sounds good.

Pesala

There are already headings in each subforum. Many forums have sticky threads asking members to read before posting, but I am sure that even these brief instructions are ignored.

New to Forum

We’d love to hear all about you and how this community might help and support you. The forum is where Vivaldi users chats about Vivaldi browser, read about Vivaldi’s latest announcements, ask questions about Vivaldi’s services or just have a chat in the lounge.

On top of that you might find the following links helpful:

Vivaldi Help
Bug Reports
Modding Vivaldi
Snapshot vs Stable

Windows Forum

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Android Forum

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Use the Search Feature before starting a new thread.
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I think it is best to post a specific reply when a new user does it wrong. Eleven links and a short paragraph is hardly a wall of text. I also edit the boiler-plate text to add specific advice or a link. If new users get it right first time, of course there is no need to repeat such information.

jane.n

I think this feature request can be considered done.
Nowadays, when a user logs in to the Forum for the first time, they get a notification which takes them to this post: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/71523/new-to-the-forum-start-here.