#1

Hi Admin,
Love the summary email truncating all the new discussions under various threads that I am beginning to get periodically.
Thank your for this amazing new feature. Really appreciate the value this platform and its discussants have generated for the participants.
Does the duscussion forum have any gates to safeguard against any AI Chatbots infiltrating or exfiltrating the discussions and user generated data?
Thank you everyone!!

#2

Thanks for participating here.

Interesting question: “Does the discussion forum have any gates to safeguard against any AI Chatbots infiltrating or exfiltrating the discussions and user generated data?”

We get bots or malign actors creating accounts here occasionally and usually the software can detect the difference between how a regular person creates an account and posts, and flags these accounts for me; and I do a check and then delete and block the account. So that seems to work quite well and we don’t get much spam here so far; and of course this is an evolving field and will have to be watched, and software updated, on an ongoing basis to prevent spam filling the forum.

On the bots accessing the forums and using UGC here; this is a public forum that anyone can read whether they are registered users or not. Its also open to search engines so that the forums get cataloged and found by people searching on these topics on Google or other search engines. So - there are no restrictions on bots accessing the data in the forum. While we could block search engines that would make the site much more difficult to find via search engines, so its a double-edged sword. Sure, we could become a walled garden like Facebook, etc. where the content is not crawled by the search engines and that forces people to “join” before they can read anything, but I think that hurts the sharing of information and knowledge and its not an approach I want to take with the site. There are lots of of forums on Facebook, etc. on longevity if that is something that you prefer.

3 Likes
#3

This raises an interesting question.

I have not seen the summary email for some time if at all. If it is an AI summary I wonder if it actually would be useful even to people who visit the site regularly. I don’t necessarily read all of the topics and a short summary might be useful on a weekly basis even if I have visited the forum. That option does not exist.