The discussion centers on confusion around the naming and functionality of Discourse AI tools, particularly the “AI Forum Helper” and “forum helper” persona. markschmucker reports that the AI Forum Helper cannot access premium categories despite their own permissions, even after adding the bot to the premium group. Falco advises creating a new persona with the Search Private and Read Private options enabled to resolve this. Jagster questions which persona the AI helper refers to, sparking a broader debate on terminology. Moin clarifies that this topic concerns the ai-bot and the “forum helper” persona—not ai-helper—and suggests asking in a new topic to avoid confusion. Jagster criticizes the ambiguous naming, noting it hampers searchability and causes misunderstandings. Moin recommends using quotes for precise searches, but Jagster counters that this only helps if users already know to expect noise. Heliosurge and Saif agree the naming should be reconsidered, with Saif referencing official docs for “Discourse AI - AI bot” and “Discourse AI - Helper”. Jagster sarcastically notes the confusion between “helper” and “forum helper”—both AI-based but distinct—highlighting the need for clearer naming conventions.
We have some categories visible to everyone, and others visible only to a premium group. I am in the premium group and can access the premium content.
When I use the AI Forum Helper, it can easily list the Hot Topics in the public categories, but cannot find any topics in the premium category. I expected it would respect my permissions. Just as an experiment, I manually added the Forum Helper to the premium group, but it still can’t seem to access the category.
Why can’t the Forum Helper help me with topics and categories that I myself can access?
Those are personas. AI helper is another thing. And I still don’t know if AI helper is using default model with its own system prompt, or so called personas.
This topic is not about ai-helper, it’s about ai-bot and the “forum helper” persona. Those two are mixed up quite often. So maybe it’s less confusing for everyone if you ask your question in a new topic.
Well, the real issue is used terms. If the only way to understand when AI helper is a mentionable AI-persona and when it is a functionality of Discourse AI, is tags (or context), we are in really big problems. And it screws up searches totally.
The mentionable persona is “forum helper”. So there is a difference to “AI helper”. And searching for forum helper works quite well. You could also use inverted commas to get even more specific results.
This starts to be really meta now, but the title and posts are using AI forum helper. And you know as good as I what happens when someone starts searching AI helper. And that comma trick works when searcher knows there will be a lot of wrong hits because of that naming.
