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Onboarding

Onboarding is a tool released by Discord in March 2023 to give servers the tools to allow users to pick their own roles and channels that they want to see, by answering questions. A very powerful tool, Onboarding is customarily linked in text chat by typing <id:customize>. Users can either be prompted to answer questions before joining the server (as an unavoidable pop-up) or after joining by navigating to "Channels & Roles" at the top of their channel sidebar.

At any time while being a member of the server, a user can change their answers to the questions posed, and hide/show certain channels they have access to.

Managing Onboarding​

Onboarding is a remarkably powerful asset for administrators. It can effectively replace reaction-roles, or other channel-based role systems, almost entirely1. While this guide will seek to be semi-comprehensive, a suscinct FAQ is written on Discord.com regarding the use of Onboarding here. The three most important details are:

  1. 'Community' must be enabled to use Onboarding;
  2. There are three modules of Onboarding management: Default Channels, Questions, and Server Guide.
  3. Some changes to Onboarding setups do not effect users that have already gone through the initial join process. Notably, changing 'default channels' will not change them for users already in the server.

Default Channels​

Default Channels are effectively channels that will be enabled and in-view of users who join the server for the first time. For a channel to be allowed to be a 'default channel' it must be accessible (read & write) by @everyone.2 To utilize Onboarding you must have at least 7 Default Channels.

Questions​

There are two types of questions in Onboarding: pre-join and post-join3. Pre-join questions have largely been seen as containing the most important questions for a user joining a server--they help guide a users experience and often can give them access to topic-specific channels that they would want to know exist. Another valuable question to include in the pre-join category involves ping-roles; asking users if they want to opt-in (or opt-out) of certain ping roles (e.g. "server news", "event ping", "polls", etc.) enables them to make choices about how they want to interact with the server prior to joining it.

Post-join questions encompass everything else! Some servers like to utilize pronoun roles, interest roles, or other personal information (favorite [x], region of residence, etc.) as post-join questions to give users the opportunity to further customize the way they present themselves on the server.

Best practice is to use pre-join questions as the category of questions that will shape the way the user interacts with the server, and post-join questions to shape the way the server interacts with the user4

Server Guide​

Server Guide is colloquiolly the forgotten child of Onboarding. Here is the Discord-written FAQ on Server Guides. Server Guide is intended to be, literally, the guidepost for which users (new and old) can reference at any moment. It is permanently visable when activated to all users, and can only be hidden by deactivating it. It is not required to be activated when Onboarding is enabled, but can be toggled on/off without effecting the rest of Onboarding. There is a separate article on the Marvelcord site linked here.

Managing the Marvel Discord Onboarding​

Default Channels​

Currently there are 16 total channels denoted as 'default channels', 8 of which @everyone has the Send Messages permission. Since Default Channels only effect new users, any changes made to this set-up will not effect what channels existing users see in Onboarding. However, any changes to the Default Channels setting should be made collectively amongst the Management team, or in coordinator with Rocked, since it can dramatically change the type of user experience we are subjecting new users to.

Questions​

There are currently four (4) pre-join questions, consisting of:

  • What do you want to chat about in this community?
    • This question is meant to give users assigned channels depending on their answer (i.e. it will "assign" them the #comics channel, if they select the Marvel Comics answer).
  • What current MARVEL spoilers are you wanting to chat about?
    • This question is bi-modal. It assigns spoiler channels depending on the users' answer (i.e. Fantastic 4 spoilers if they select the respective answer), but ALSO will help prevent other users who do NOT want to see spoilers from accidentally stumbling upon them.
  • What events do you want to get notified about?
    • Fairly self-explanatory--this question has a variety of event-type answers such as upcoming comic releases, polls, art-based events, and more. The answers often assign both a channel and a role, respectively.
  • Choose a character! Their emoji will show next to your username!5
    • This is what our users REALLY come for (and go to Modmail about) most often. This question assigns them a role that ALWAYS has a specific role-icon that appears at the end of the users' name in chat. It is a unique way for them to show some flair. None of the roles assigned have special permissions or special colors--just role icons.

There are currently two (2) post-join questions, consisting of:

  • What are your pronouns?
  • What extra channel collections are you interested in?

Server Guide​

ManagerShadow
@julianinvictus@rixov

Footnotes​

  1. There is a maximum number of answers a single question can have, and therefore some servers choose to not utilize onboarding if they have a question with more than 50 possible answers. ↩

  2. Default channels can be disallowed for users with a role. E.g. I can disallow users from seeing [x] default channel after they have a certain role. ↩

  3. Pre-join questions are still visable via "Channels & Roles" after joining the server. ↩

  4. Subject to change. ↩

  5. This is, generally speaking, the most contentious piece of the Onboarding experience from a Management perspective. Since Discord limits the number of answer-options we can add to fifty (50), users are frequently asking us to add their favorite respective hero to the Choose a character question. We like to note these requests, but openly note that we cannot honor every request, and we try our best to rotate options out. My advice is to look at the number of users with a given hero role selected, and prioritize the lowest-selected roles for being changed out. ↩