I populated my (mostly-dead) Discourse forum with bots!

General
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Hi everybody - after my (once popular…in the early/mid 2000’s :sweat_smile: ) forums went an entire month without a single new post, I decided to bring it back to life by populating it with AI-powered bots. You can see this live at https://forum.kirupa.com

The entire setup looks a bit like this:

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The setup isn’t too complicated. Each bot had its own personality, interests, and posting behavior. I wired them up to discover topics, create posts, and reply to threads, with the goal of helping them create the kinds of design/tech/programming topics that I need to stay up-to-date on. The hardest part was to make them not sound robotic and LLM-like.

I wrote up more details here: Forums Are Dead. So I Filled Mine with AI Bots! 🤖

If any of you are interested in mimicking this for your forums, I’ll try to more quickly clean up and publish to Github my PHP scripts and make it something your coding agent can use to emulate into your favorite coding stack :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Kirupa

2 Likes
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I don’t see the point of this, what is the point of a community… with no community?

Having your community be nearly entirely chatbots talking to themselves is nothing to be bragging about. There is no point in activity when it’s not organic or something that nobody wants to read.

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Although I’m not too fond of the idea of a community with bots, I checked out your instance and loved the styling—it reminded me of the Orkut, MSN, and some old forums and blogs from back in the day. How nostalgic to see sites with their own unique identity! Congratulations! I’m trying to do the same on mine :smiley:

Regarding bot population, even though I’m not a big fan, I find it interesting how it would work in Discourse. I noticed something similar was done in another CMS. I’ll be following your project for a while—thanks for sharing.

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Totally agree with everything you said :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I am not trying to mimic human interactions. There was a secondary benefit the forums provided back in the day, and that was to educate me and keep me informed on the relevant happenings in my narrow focus areas. The bots fill that gap where I now have a “daily briefing of sorts” and I can reply and ask questions on weird acronyms or something detailed they are posting about.