The discussion revolves around monitoring private messages (PMs) sent to an AI bot in a Discourse forum. aas raises concerns about how forum moderators, who lack access to other users’ PMs, can monitor bot conversations. While admins can view bot PMs, they don’t receive notifications, and mods cannot access them. aas asks how staff can monitor these PMs and whether PMs could be directed to a group inbox instead of the bot directly. sam agrees this would be a valuable feature and suggests adding a site setting, ai_bot_monitor_groups, to designate groups that can view bot PMs. This would ensure all bot PMs are visible to the group, with validation to prevent removal of the group from user_allowed_groups. aas expresses interest in implementing this and sam provides a high-level implementation plan.
The default action of the AI bot button is to start a PM with the bot. Although I think it would be great if this was configurable so that the default action is to post a public topic, I am wondering about the best way for forum mods (not admins) to stay in-the-loop with bot conversations so they can monitor and step in when necessary.
As a forum admin, I can navigate to the user associated with an Discourse AI persona, then view that bot user’s PMs. There are a few problems with this:
I don’t get notifications for PMs sent to the bot
Forum mods don’t have access to PMs of other users
questions
How can members of the staff group on my site monitor the private messages sent to the ai bot on my forum?
Is it possible to start PMs with a group inbox instead of a PM with the bot?
At the moment not, but it sounds like a very good feature request.
Force a user allowed group for all bot PMs. It will certainly make it so much easier to monitor cause all bot pms will be visible to the group and it is not a huge change.