Give every bot a name tag

Quick follow-up to my longer post this morning about agents and integrations. Whenever I talk about this, people ask what it looks like in practice on our own network, so here's the first and least exciting rule we settled on: every bot gets its own profile.

For the first year, our little automations ran under my admin account. The welcome message for new members, the weekly digest, the script that tidies up expired event listings. It was convenient right up until a member asked me why I had liked 40 posts at four in the morning. I hadn't. A badly written script had.

What a separate profile gives you

• Honesty. Members can see when they're talking to automation. Our welcome bot says so in its name and its bio.
• Its own permissions. The bot's account sits in a membership level with only the actions it needs. It can post in Welcome Lounge and send notifications. It can't delete anything, and it can't read private messages.
• A clean history. Everything it does shows up under its own name, so when something looks odd I can filter by one profile instead of guessing which of "my" actions were really mine.
• An off switch. Suspending one account stops the whole thing without touching anyone's real login.

What we put in the bio

Three lines: what the bot does, who looks after it, and how to report a problem. It sounds fussy, but it stopped the "is this a real person?" questions almost overnight.

None of this is clever. It's what you'd do for a new human moderator: a name tag, a clear role and keys only to the rooms they need. Next post in this little series is about webhooks, because ours fired twice last week and I'm still a bit annoyed about it.