Allow AI Persona/Agent to respond only to @mentions, not to replies to its posts

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When an AI Persona has “Allow topic mentions” enabled, it responds in two situations:

  1. When a user @mentions the bot in a post

  2. When a user replies to one of the bot’s existing posts

I’d like a way to limit the persona to only respond when explicitly @mentioned, and not respond automatically when someone replies to its post.

Use case: I run an AI bot in a community forum where members discuss topics with each other. Sometimes a member replies to the bot’s post to continue talking to other humans in the thread — not to ask the bot another question. The bot jumping in on every reply creates noise and disrupts the natural conversation flow.

I tried handling this via the system prompt (instructing the persona to only respond when @mentioned), but this doesn’t reliably work — the LLM is already triggered to generate a response by the time it sees the prompt.

Proposed solution: A separate toggle in the persona settings, something like:

  • :check_box_with_check: Allow topic mentions (existing)

  • :check_box_with_check: Respond only to @mentions (new — when enabled, replies to the bot’s posts would not trigger a response)

Or alternatively, a single setting like “Require @mention to respond in topics” that covers this behavior.

Would love to hear if others have run into this or if there’s a workaround I’m missing. Thanks!

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This is such a edge case feature, I wonder if this is just a better default and we always require a mention for topics. I worry about option paralysis here, might as well just pick an option that is easier to explain.

@mcwumbly / @Falco thoughts?

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Indeed, this is such an edge case that I feel we should wait for project workflows, so users can create their automated workflows to handle their niche needs.

All it needs is one @mention trigger, and all can be handled via a workflow.

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thanks @sam, @Falco

this setting was a way to solve this problem: Adding a configurable delay to AI Agent responses

I have shared a temporary fix to work around the problem here.

Still testing it, but it’s working so far.