# Discourse AI does not respect the "everyone" group
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048
**Category:** Bug
**Tags:** ai, ai-bot
**Created:** [January 18, 2024, 7:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048 "2024-01-18T07:34:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Rusty\_M](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Rusty_M)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2024, 7:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/1 "2024-01-18T07:34:41Z")
It looks like this is the same known issue that causes problems with templates.
[everyone-group-unable-to-see-private-templates](https://meta.discourse.org/t/everyone-group-unable-to-see-private-templates/277514)
In this case, the ai-bot options appear, but the bot simply never responds.
---
### Author:  [@maiki](https://meta.discourse.org/u/maiki)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2024, 9:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/2 "2024-01-18T21:16:00Z")
Thanks for searching for prior issues! đ¶ đ
I think the same applies here:
> [@"everyone" group unable to see private templates](https://meta.discourse.org/t/everyone-group-unable-to-see-private-templates/277514/5):
>
> âEveryoneâ is more a pseudo group that includes anon, and probably shouldnât be included as an available group to set here. đ€
>
> I think setting TL0 would be the thing to do. đ
You can not give anonymous users access to the chat bot, so using `trust_level_0` is an effective solution for your use case. đ
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [July 24, 2025, 6:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/3 "2025-07-24T06:44:12Z")
@Roman reading through the code in Discourse I think this works now.
>
Is it time to close this off and remove the backwards compat code?
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### Author:  [@Roman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Roman)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2025, 7:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/4 "2025-07-29T19:06:25Z")
Itâs a bit tricky. I originally added the `everyone` option because we wanted to let anonymous users see gists. Every feature has its own rules so I donât think setting a Personaâs allowed groups to that will make the feature available to everyone.
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### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [December 8, 2025, 7:13pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/5 "2025-12-08T19:13:39Z")
This is still an issue. If âAI bot allowed groupsâ is set to `everyone`, the bot does not respond.
I think the bug is [here](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/455b9dae1f468dd282570cd12bde47fe52360c2c/plugins/discourse-ai/lib/ai_bot/playground.rb#L730C9-L730C93)
`return false if (SiteSetting.ai_bot_allowed_groups_map & post.user.group_ids).blank?`
If the setting is `everyone` then this returns false, since 0 is not in `post.user.group_ids`
The correct pattern is `!user.in_any_groups?(SiteSetting.ai_bot_allowed_groups_map)`
which has a special case for `everyone`:
```plaintext
def in_any_groups?(group_ids)
group_ids.include?(Group::AUTO_GROUPS[:everyone]) ||
(is_system_user? && (Group.auto_groups_between(:admins, :trust_level_4) & group_ids).any?) ||
(group_ids & belonging_to_group_ids).any?
end
```
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### Author:  [@Moin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Moin)
#### Post date: [March 5, 2026, 2:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/6 "2026-03-05T14:28:35Z")
> [@RGJ](#):
>
> ai\_bot\_allowed\_groups
Does it make sense to disallow âeveryoneâ to be selected for that setting? Similar to how it was done in [DEV: restrict everyone on whisper groups via a new disallowed\_groups attr by renato · Pull Request #37515 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/37515)
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2026, 5:00am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/7 "2026-03-06T05:00:41Z")
Yeah we got to remove it⊠@martin has on his list to clean a lot of this up, but it may take a bit.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2026, 7:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/8 "2026-08-24T07:04:04Z")
@martin should we close this one? just patch current?
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [August 26, 2026, 11:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-does-not-respect-the-everyone-group/292048/9 "2026-08-26T23:37:11Z")
Small PR here to do it, along with fixing this bug:
> [@RGJ](#):
>
> `return false if (SiteSetting.ai_bot_allowed_groups_map & post.user.group_ids).blank?`
>
>
> Also fix one call site where user.in\_any\_groups? was not used