**Proposal:** We could have a personal bot for Wikimedia-Zulip that sends customized messages to new users who sign-up and/or who ask for information on getting started.
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**Background**
New contributors find their way to Wikimedia's Zulip group chat quite frequently. It is also used for GSoC, Outreachy and GSoD discussions. One of the first things they usually ask is information on contributing and getting started. The answer to this seems to be fairly consistent, i.e. pointing them to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_first_bugs, etc.
I believe a mechanism to automate this process would be helpful because:
- It sometimes takes multiple hours/days for experienced users to reply to newcomers' queries
- Having a welcome message from the org when we sign-up is just a nice thing to have
**Current state of affairs**
Currently, Zulip does not support a feature that would allow us to customize the Welcome messages directly.
I looked it up and found a 2017 Code-In task (https://codein.withgoogle.com/archive/2017/organization/5080845647872000/task/5498541149519872/) related to this.
Going through their codebase,
- it doesn't look like the code-in solution was added to Zulip
- the welcome messages seem to be hardcoded (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/092662d83e9cb313e2180583912c53ef977c570e/zerver/lib/onboarding.py)
**Proposed Features**
* Welcome new members and share with them kick-start resources related to Wikimedia Outreach projects.
* Bot should provide help around FAQs (for example by using the following syntax: **+search-faqs: <then question>**), so we don't wait for a human (waste of time) and also avoid repeating answers.
* Direct channel members to the relevant members and/or relevant streams/topics.
* <more to be added>
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**Mentors:** PM - @Pavithraes, SMs - [ @Medhabansal & @D3r1ck01 ]
**Required skills:** Python3 (+any Python framework - Flask, Django), JavaScript (+any JS framework - NodeJS), Linux Administration ([[ https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge | Toolforge related ]]), Technical Writing, ??
**Microtasks:** [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_first_bugs | https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_first_bugs ]]