Had an interesting chat with discobot

[hukka]

Being a newbie here at the forum, I received a message from discobot.

It was about a short interactive introduction to the functions of the software that powers the forum. …the first time a bot has been my teacher, but things started out just fine, nonetheless.

But then it instructed me on how to erase a posting by describing where to find the icon for that. It was supposed to be in the … menu but no, it wasn’t.

So I jumped to the next part and was supposed to restore a message that had been deleted. The result was as with the erase icon: I could see the message, but the restore icon wasn’t available in the … menu.

Is there something wrong with my editing rights or did I just have a chat with a bot gone insane?

[nrickert]

I’m just guessing.

It sounds as if this was a tutorial about using the Discourse software. Some of the features have not been implemented on this forum, which could be why you didn’t find those icons.

[hukka]

It was indeed an interactive course. The problem seems to be that the erase and restore icons are visible here but not with discobot.

[Bird]

@discobot

Great work!

Note that edits made after 5 minutes will show up as public edit revisions, and a little pencil icon will appear at the upper right with the revision count.

If you’d like to withdraw a post you made, you can delete it.

Go ahead and delete any of your posts above by using the delete action. Don’t delete the first post, though!

Do you mean this? Back when I did the advanced tutorial it worked without a problem. I just started the advanced tutorial again and indeed there was no delete button. It must have disappeared after the recent Forum updates.

Either back in December:

Factory Mailing List problem

@Bird yes, there was an upgrade of the Forum software that had a couple of issues that needed resolving…

Or the update last week:

Auto-Close and "Solved" Forum Changes

Recent Forum Changes On March 17, we implemented two changes in the forum’s technical categories. First, we enabled the “auto close topics” functionality to close inactive topics. Secondly, we implemented a frequently-requested feature to mark a response as a solution. Note: You may have seen a one-time anomalous number of unread messages waiting for you; the change to the auto close setting added a system message to each closed topic, and if you were watching the topic, that’s what triggere…

Also this thread should probably be moved to Forum feedback, because the open chat category is not really for problem solving.

[hendersj]

It is a generic bot that trains on Discourse in general, but we do have some configuration changes that we’ve made that it probably doesn’t know about (such as erasing and restoring messages). We have a time limit implemented for deleting (and editing) your own posts.

It is possible that a software update (which does happen fairly regularly with Discourse) might have changed the behavior or introduced a bug.

I’ll go ahead and move this to the forums feedback category - but I will say that it’s very likely not a permissions issue (as we use default permissions ), likely just a disparity between configuration and what discobot knows about.