Make the "account details" email more useful

This was a big point of contention for Leisa over at http://www.slideshare.net/leisa/the-prairie-initiative-update so I'm tagging appropriately.

There should definately be links in this email that you can refer back to and overall it could use a more engaging tone of voice
Quick ideas on pages (existing or not) I'd want to link to:

- Getting started guides for site builders first, contributing second
- Explain the dashboard – there would be a 'Welcome, get started' block on it
- (Overview of topics/initiatives? #1300972: Implement initiative content type, though that's potentially pretty advanced
- Invite people to fill out some profile details

I think most of this should be handled on the page you land on when confirming your account though, the links in the email are a (useful!) fallback.

There was an idea by lizzjoy to create a new Welcome email for the new d.o account holders (http://groups.drupal.org/node/238008, http://groups.drupal.org/node/243238). Originally the plan was to send such an email after the "account details" one. But probably we should just improve "account details" email instead of sending more of them.

Proposed new text for the "account details" email (moving from the g.d.o wiki):

Email Subject: Welcome to the Drupal Community

Email Body:
Welcome to the Drupal Community!
You have an account, Now what?

This is a handy guide to get you started.

First, learn your account information:

username: !username (the username is case sensitive)
password: !password

You can also log-in automatically using this one-time link:
!login_url

Tell the community who you are:
After logging in, you will be redirected to !edit_uri so you can change your password and add some details about yourself.

Come for the software

Get started with Drupal: http://drupal.org/start

Find a host for your website: http://drupal.org/hosting

Get Drupal training: http://drupal.org/training-services

Stay for the Community

Meet our community http://drupal.org/community and the Drupal Association https://association.drupal.org

Get Involved with the project: http://drupal.org/getting-involved

Find local user group near you: http://groups.drupal.org

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We look forward to having you as a part of Drupal.

The account's password should not be included in the email. (This is basically my opinion, but it seems to be shared by Drupal core; as of D7 the password token is no longer available and the default welcome email says "password: Your password" instead of actually including the password.)

The one-time login link, and the subsequent password reset mechanism, should be enough for people who do not remember their password.

Other than that, it looks good to me...

Agreed with @kingandy - remove the password and it looks generally quite good :)

yep

Updated issue summary and made following changes to the proposed text:

First, learn your account information:

username: !username (the username is case sensitive)
password: log-in using this one-time link: !login_url and set your password. You can also add some details about yourself to tell the community who you are!

Currently when people register on d.o they don't enter desired password and see the message: "Your password and further instructions have been sent to your e-mail address." Should we maybe edit this message now that we don't actually send password to e-mail?

When one-time login link is being used - there is a message "Login to change your password". "Change" should probably be replaced with "set", for not to be confusing.

I don't think the one-time login system differentiates between links sent out on user registration and links sent out via the "request password" tab.

Hmm, right. How about:

password: your account now has randomly generated password, log-in using this one-time link: !login_url to change it. You can also add some details about yourself to tell the community who you are!

I'm just concerned that once we remove the password from e-mail, next steps might become confusing for a new user e.g. why I need to change a password when I never entered one and don't even know what is the current one?

@tvn - I haven't experienced that confusion on Drupal 7 sites I help out running or d6 sites where we removed the password. I think the proposed text in #8 is great. If we seem to get a lot of confused users we can always tweak.

I would also be willing to run some queries to try to identify the "engagement" level of users (i.e. did this email change increase or reduce the number of people who login and fill in profile information, for example).

ok! updated issue summary with the text from #8. guess we need couple more opinions to call this RTBC?

issue summary

I'd rather we weren't using so many exclamation points. Tell the community who you are! Follow us on Twitter! NOW!!! ;)

Otherwise, this looks much better. However, we only get plain ASCII text here, so we can't bold the little mini headings like you've got it in the summary, nor include embedded links. Maybe we can do some ASCII art heading stuff like:

---------------------
Come for the software
---------------------

Get started with Drupal: http://drupal.org/start

Find a host for your website: http://drupal.org/hosting

Get Drupal training: http://drupal.org/training-services

----------------------
Stay for the Community
----------------------

Meet our community http://drupal.org/community and the Drupal Association https://association.drupal.org
...

updating password text

dww, thanks for the comment, updated issue summary again. !! :)

Any more opinions on this?
I think I'm going to wait till Monday - and if there will be no objections by then - go ahead and implement this. We can always tweak later.

updating text

Implemented this, with the only addition - "Welcome to the Drupal Community, !username!"

Someone modified the template and password is now included in the email. I'm wondering if there was a reason for that or if we should remove it again.

No reason I know - let's change it back.

Removed password according to template in the issue summary.

There were some other additions to the template which I kept: events (http://groups.drupal.org/events) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Drupal/8427738891) links.