ForaFrank, Staff Since May 2025
Like it or not, Vertical Scope is currently testing an AI assistant to help drive engagement, especially on unanswered threads with a single post. It's intended to assist with engagement and not with diagnosing any issues, although, it may do a search function on the site to gather some data that could be useful. They are still very much tweaking its algorithm to optimize its engagement without seeming spammy. They made it a staff member so the ability to abuse or ignore it is limited.
While it is not currently on our site, I'd expect that it will be soon. I encourage everyone to try to see it for what it is and not be too harsh on how it responds, but focus on the fact that it responded to someone that was looking for a response. We'll be closely monitoring its activities and providing feedback to the VS Admins to assist with adjusting it's algorithm to make it more useful.
Here's the full announcement from the VS Admins:
We wanted to give you a quick heads-up about an experiment we’ll be running as part of our ongoing efforts to keep forums thriving and engaging with new members.
We've noticed some threads, especially ones by newer users or involving niche topics, sometimes go unanswered under “What's New” > “Looking for Replies,” and we're looking at ways to kickstart more lively discussion in them.
Small-scale tests using AI replies on this content on other communities have shown increased community engagement and we're experimenting with different ways to integrate these AI replies with a light-touch approach to see how the community reacts to each of them.
We’ll create and deploy a small group of test users or a branded AI Bot to post AI-generated (human-reviewed) replies on older, previously high-traffic threads or threads looking for replies.
These users will also engage with the posts (e.g., liking them and marking them as helpful) to simulate natural engagement patterns.
The goal is to assess whether this activity positively impacts thread visibility and site performance. Each account uses the format @verticalscope.com and might be using various shared IP's, so please ensure they are not flagged or banned as spam.
As soon as I hear more on this, I'll share it here.