Forum Bots

[Azareal]

Around mid-2017, Discourse added a bot. Every-time someone signs up, it PMs them with some bullet points and they can play a little game with it. They've been gradually adding more and more commands to the thing.

I've seen other bots interacting with members on other Discourse instances too, including ones made by members for fun. It's kinda interesting to see new things in this in forums, it's reminds me of my times on Discord with people playing around.

What do you think?

 

[Page]

Other made Welcoming bots! they make an topic and pm the new members saying welcome and the rules and whatnot that they need to know

 

[Shannon Apple]

@Empire: I've done that, but I have set my own account up as the "bot." Eventhough it's an automated welcome message, if they respond to it, I get to read it and respond back. 🙂

 

[Page]

@Empire: I've done that, but I have set my own account up as the "bot." Eventhough it's an automated welcome message, if they respond to it, I get to read it and respond back. 🙂

same, Yet I can see all PMS in my ACP

 

[Salt]

So is it like a SmarterChild AIM not but for forums?

 

[simonweb]

I'm confident that bots and smart AI is the future of forum software. I wonder which forum software will be the first one to utilize this in a smart and useful way?

 

[Shannon Apple]

@Empire: I've done that, but I have set my own account up as the "bot." Eventhough it's an automated welcome message, if they respond to it, I get to read it and respond back. 🙂

same, Yet I can see all PMS in my ACP

We don't do that, it's an invasion of privacy to read other people's PMs. IF and I repeat, IF something bad happens, we can then go in through the backend and look at someone's account. That's a bit of hassle, but it prevents people from getting tempted and taking peaks in other people's business. It's always been our policy not to give admins free access to roam through people's private messages. If someone comes to our site and tries to solicit membership, 99% of members are going to report that PM. We're not paranoid about that because we can trust the members. It's a two-way street. They in turn trust the staff ^^

Don't get me wrong, we have done it. We have gone into an accounts PMs after we got reports about predatory behaviour on young girls on our previous site. We're not beyond doing it if it calls for it. We have a sort of duty to protect our members.

 

[tuantung01]

i don't like bot

 

[simonweb]

i don't like bot

Sure, everyone hates spam bots. But imagine if we could have useful bots that help us moderate our forums and introduce new members to the community.

 

[Azareal]

I'm confident that bots and smart AI is the future of forum software. I wonder which forum software will be the first one to utilize this in a smart and useful way?

Some people find it annoying, but Discourse does have a few features where it tries to guide the path of the conversation, for instance, if it's just two people going back and forth in a topic, then Discourse'll mention the option of taking the discussion elsewhere.

The only thing with features like this is that they don't take nuance into account, the same way that a human moderator might, but it does help avoid hard feeling between the mod and the user, if it's the software hinting that the discussion's gone awry.