'Watch' suspicious users

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

ganncamp requests a feature allowing admins (and possibly moderators) to silently ‘watch’ specific users — receiving notifications for their new posts or edits — to monitor suspicious activity, especially in light of increasing AI-generated spam. They note that the 2017 workaround (RSS feeds) is no longer viable and that current Discourse notifications should handle this natively. Mittens agrees, emphasizing the need for stealth — users shouldn’t be notified they’re being watched. ganncamp confirms this preference. awesomerobot suggests workarounds: using the Follow plugin with hidden notifications (though it can’t be restricted to admins), or leveraging AI Triage or Automation plugins to flag posts from a hidden ‘suspicious user’ group — either via AI analysis or simple chat alerts in admin-only channels. While no solution perfectly matches the request, these alternatives offer partial functionality, and awesomerobot proposes extending Automation to flag posts based solely on user group membership, similar to existing keyword-based flagging.

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I’m creating a new thread because the one I’ve chimed in on previously is a) ‘Solved’ and b) from 2017.

In 2017 the ‘solution’ of

seemed reasonable, I suppose.

Today, I don’t see an RSS feed on the user page. I suppose I could URL-hack to get to it, but as a Discourse user, I expect my Discourse notifications to come to me… in Discourse.

And, in this new AI era, I feel the need - as an admin - to keep an eye on suspcious new users more strongly every day.

Just today I had a new “user” resurrect a 3-year-old thread to add slightly-outdated advice to it. It was my colleague who pointed out that the post was probably written by AI.

Which implies that the spammers are trying to build reputation in the community to be able to… what? I don’t know. That’s why I’d like to keep an eye on them.

But as of right now, I really can’t.

So please, as laid out in this other thread,

  • give only admins (and maybe mods)
  • the ability to ‘follow’ specific users
  • to be notified of new posts / edits from those users

I’m not asking for “social platform” dynamics. Just a way to keep a stink-eye on suspicious characters.

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It would be nice to have a way to follow a user without notifying them, since they will know that we are watching when they get a “this user is following you” message…

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Never occurred to me they’d be notified.

I suppose a watch notification would part of that “social platform” stuff we don’t want here.

But to be clear: Yes. This too

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The follow plugin can have following notifications and visibility into who is following who hidden with the settings included… but it’s not currently possible to restrict that plugin to admin use only… so, not ideal

Another option may be to fight fire with fire and use AI Triage to monitor specific users.

Triage could be configured to only apply to users in a specific group, so you could have a “suspicious user” group that only admins can see… and feed every post/edit from a member of that group into AI for analysis based on a custom prompt. Based on the output of that the relevant post can be flagged for moderation. This could help with the moderation itself, rather than only providing notifications for manual review. You could have the AI check for new links and flag based on that for example.

If you don’t want to involve AI you could use the Automation plugin configured in a similar way to send a chat message referencing new posts from a certain group in an admin-only channel.

None of these fit the request exactly but get sorta close.

We could possibly add a new automation script that simply flags posts from people in certain groups, we have one that flags posts based on words within posts… so it might just take some minor adjustment to remove that requirement.

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