Discourse Chatbot šŸ¤–

Customization Plugin
1106

Onze bot kreeg time-outs totdat we de redenering op minimaal hebben ingesteld. Bedankt!

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1107

Eerlijk gezegd vind ik GPT-5 over het algemeen te traag en is de extra responstijd niet duidelijk de moeite waard.

Hoe heb je het ervaren voor je supportbot?

1108

Ik heb gpt-5 geprobeerd via Chat GPT, dat is echt een heel ander ding dan via de API, en het heeft die lange redeneertijd nodig om iets betere antwoorden te geven dan 4o of o1 zou geven. Als het snel moet antwoorden, is het niet beter dan 4.1.

Ik ben er vrij zeker van dat de situatie hetzelfde is, of erger vanwege het gebrek aan tools en prompting, bij gebruik van de API. Maar ik weet het niet zeker, omdat gpt-5 pijnlijk langzaam is en in een forumomgeving moet het bijna met lichtsnelheid antwoorden.

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1109

In terms of content performance, anecdotally, it seems like gpt-5 is giving noticeably better technical answers that gpt-4o. Iā€™m not sure how to quantify that but it really impressed me.

Iā€™m getting varying results in how long it takes to respond. It does seem, from experimenting this morning, like gpt-5 is slower on average but not by too much, and there were some cases where the response came faster with gpt-5. Iā€™m measuring anywhere from 5 seconds to 35 seconds for a reply.

Weā€™re using RAG and I canā€™t tell what portion of the latency is from the RAG search vs the chat completion. It could be that sometimes it chooses not to RAG search, the search happens faster, or something is cached (in the search or the completion).

We would typically choose better answers over a faster response because giving customers bad technical advice is costly. Up to a point though, if it times out then thatā€™s a very bad user experience.

GPT-5 recommends primarily gpt-5-mini for our use case, and escalate to gpt-5 in some circumstances. Sounds neat but complicated. Have you considered switching between models dynamically? Why doesnā€™t OpenAI just do that automatically? ChatGPT - Compare GPT models performance

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1111

We moesten terugschakelen naar gpt-4o omdat gpt-5-mini blijkbaar denkt dat het dingen kan die het niet kan. Het bood vol vertrouwen aan om de alarmbewakingsservice van een klant in te stellen en deze te verbinden met hun thuisalarmapparatuur. Het vroeg hen om apparatuur-ID-nummers en hallucineerde alsof het een conciƫrge was die alles voor hen instelde. Onze website kan dat, maar de chatbot niet. Het lijkt de beveiligingsmaatregelen in de systeemprompt niet te respecteren zoals gpt-4o dat wel deed. We zullen het moeten aanscherpen voordat we mensen het kunnen laten gebruiken.

Update: Het blijkt dat gpt-5 veel beter is in het volgen van instructies en het respecteren van regels in de prompt dan gpt-5-mini. Als je een bot je merk wilt laten vertegenwoordigen, raad ik gpt-5 aan, ook al is het langzamer en 5x duurder. Er is te veel risico dat gpt-5-mini ontspoort.

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1112

I have had really good luck with GTP-5-mini in agentic flows via tool calling, code writing and structured data. I generally find structured data is easier for AI apps than unstructured ! .. not what I expected ! but guardrails are easier .. (code-in-loop, human-in-loop, llm-as-judge, etc)

please watch this for blow by blow walkthru of high performance , low cost gpt-5-mini and gpt-4o ā€¦

If anyone out there is interested in working structured data capabilities into Discourse as a plugin, etc. Please reach out.

An NLP extension for sql/stats/datascience to Data Explorer is an example.. But could also possibly have a tool / plugin / feature that allows natural language queries of read-only sqlLite or duckdb etc olap files loaded into the container ? just a thought.. :thinking:

1114

Btw, I added GPT 5.1 to the plugin along with some fixes:

https://github.com/merefield/discourse-chatbot/pull/147

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1115

@tom_eric you asked about the ability to play games with other forum members on another Topic.

I tried this prompt with Chatbot and it seems to work with GPT 5.1, try it out:

@Chatbot facilitate a 9x9 game of Go with @Other_Player and I using a markdown table to render the board - let me go first and only accept plays from myself and @Other_Player and only when it is our turn - render the board and ask me to kick off ā€¦

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1116

Oh, thank you. Thatā€™s a really creative idea.Oh, thank you. Thatā€™s a really creative idea.

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1117

np let me know how that works out :+1:

1118

A slightly customized dev setup let me experiment with Chatbot playing Zork using this plugin and Discourse Frotz :man_mage:

(here with GPT 5.1 on lower reasoning)

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A little time later:

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Racking up quite a score! And:

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:open_mouth:

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:graduation_cap:

(Apologies, setup is a little too complex to simply share here).

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1119

Wow! I had no idea that was possible. Guess pretty much anything is possible with good prompts :sweat_smile:

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1120

Chatbot model dropdowns now have gpt 5.2 and 5.2 pro - and for 5.2 there is now an xhigh reasoning level if you love burning tokens and devastating the environment :sweat_smile:

You may also notice that users of the Maths Plugin can now easily get Chatbot to discuss maths with nicely rendered maths equations without adding anything to the system prompt ā€¦

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1121

Iā€™ve moved the launch button to a much neater location in the bottom right (except for iOS PWA/app) - let me know if thatā€™s not working as intended.

This was always intended to simplify the css whilst accommodating those annoying control bars on iOS, but I couldnā€™t live with it any longer, it was offending my eyes :face_vomiting: :sweat_smile:

1122

@ThisSource this was the first AI chatbot for Discourse and is still running :).

1123

Delighted to announce my first ongoing business sponsor of Chatbot, Surety, who now occupy the new Project Sponsor section of the README.

Surety is on a mission to provide professional-grade security alarm monitoring and home automation to DIYers in the most transparent and efficient way possible, bucking the trend in the home security industry.

Thank you Surety!

@37Rb

If youā€™d like to become a sponsor of one of my projects, take a look at: Sponsor @merefield on GitHub Sponsors Ā· GitHub :folded_hands:

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1124

Recent PR summary ā€” 1ā€“3 August 2026

Several related PRs were merged across Discourse Chatbot and its extension plugins.

Highlights

  • Introduced advanced local reasoning strategies, including verify-and-revise, best-of-two, and uncertainty-guided reasoning.
  • Added current OpenAI models and the new max reasoning effort.
  • Added a semantic blocked-question gate using embedding similarity.
    • significant savings as uses embeddings to block subjects you donā€™t wish the bot to handle without costing you LLM tokens.
  • Consolidated the basic and RAG implementations into a single DiscourseChatbot::Bot.
  • Replaced bot-mode settings with trust-level built-in tool selectors.
  • Renamed the extension API from ā€œFunctionā€ to ā€œToolā€.
  • Replaced the SafeRuby based calculator tool with the constrained Dentaku expression evaluator - this is a big improvement in security, as despite its name, there are vulnerabilities in SafeRuby.
  • Adopted Zeitwerk loading across Chatbot and its extension plugins.
  • Moved location-specific tools into the Locations Early Access plugin (sponsor me to regain access)
  • Improved calculator error recovery and support for common Ļ€/e notation.
  • Refreshed the README
  • Advanced the main plugin from version 1.8.0 to 2.4.1.

Discourse Chatbot

Companion plugins

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1125

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1126

@Karthik_K1 please take a look at the screenshot in the last Post

Chatbot cost-effectively all but solves this problem:

Obviously if you are unable to install third party plugins, this will be of little help.

I expect the solution to be better than System Prompt based guards but it wonā€™t be completely foolproof and you can indeed get too strict and block some otherwise reasonable messages in any case.

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1127

Just dropped some cache optimisations, which should lower the cost of using Chatbot and speed up its response.