The discussion revolves around an issue with Discobot, a bot on the Discourse platform, interacting with a non-technical user. Martin_Cash shared screenshots of the interaction, where the bot asks the user to post a link, and after the user fails to do so correctly, the bot repeats the request. However, the user gets blocked by the system for spam.
Codinghorror points out that the relevant issue is the bot’s instruction to say “skip” to bypass the step. Tgxworld agrees that users can run afoul of the spam URL link checking and plans to disable the check during the bot interaction.
Tophee suggests improving the bot’s copy to avoid the issue, either by removing bullet points or changing the bot’s reply to provide clearer instructions. Codinghorror mentions that PMs should be excluded from the spam link check due to false positives and instructs Tgxworld not to follow up on the issue.
Codinghorror also changes the bot’s instruction to make the link easier to cut and paste. Finally, Neil commits a fix to ignore PMs from the spam link check.
It looks like during a “start new user” introduction, Discobot asks the user to post a link, after the user failed to provide what Discobot was looking for, Discobot repeated the request so the member could try again. The member tried to post the link a second time (incorrectly) and got blocked by System for spam. 
Discobot then begins taunting the user
I am not sure “taunt” is at all a correct use of the English language here.. the relevant bit is
If you’d like to skip this step, say
skip
Is it possible for a user to run afoul of the spam URL link checking here @tgxworld?
Yup I don’t think we check/revert the site setting here. I’ll have a look to see if I can disable that check during the interaction with the bot.
Looking at these screenshot two things come to mind:
I told @neil we need to exclude all PMs from the spam link check since there have been wayyyyy too many false positives on that in a variety of scenarios, not just this one – so you don’t need to follow up on this @tgxworld.
I am also changing from
Can you try adding the following link, on its own line, in your next reply?
to
Can you try adding the following link, on its own line, in your next reply?
using the < and > chars around the link to make it remain a plain not-oneboxed link, but easier to cut and paste.
(it’s not even possible to select that bullet in Chrome or Firefox, try it yourself, so this also presupposes a very bizarre browser the user is using..)
I committed a fix to ignore PMs.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/15a74d6d3e3c51ffd3475be3c327c2ec0ed9322d
