**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.
**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/New_Developers, 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)