Discord8 of 10
What she remembers about people
On this page
Two stores, kept deliberately apart.
The conversation of a channel
Every turn she answers is written to the database: your message, prefixed with your display name and handle, and her reply. The session is the channel, so that history survives a restart of the bot and is what she reads back on the next turn in the same channel.
That means one channel is one shared memory. When she answers you there, she has read what other people said in that channel too.
Her notes about a person
Separate from the above, and separate again from what she knows about her own person, is a small
table of facts about the people she meets on Discord: discord_people (who they are) and
discord_person_facts (one short statement each, with where it came from).
A discord_people row is written for everyone she answers, whether or not she is ever asked to
remember them: her user id, handle and display name, kept the first time she replies to them. That
happens automatically, on every answered turn. discord_person_facts — the notes themselves — is the
half that only discord_remember_person writes. Its rules:
| Rule | Why |
|---|---|
| A guest may only leave a note about themselves | What she knows about somebody is replayed into her own instructions on that person's next turn. A stranger writing a fact about you would be writing into her instructions |
| A fact about her person is refused and redirected | Nothing outside the bot reads this table, so a fact about him kept here would not follow him to the terminal or the web. His go to the memory every surface reads |
| One fact per call, at most 240 characters | Enforced in the tool: longer is refused |
| Third person, in English | Asked for in the tool's description, not enforced — a fact in another shape is stored as written |
The source is recorded — said, told or observed | She can say "someone else told me that" when she repeats it |
| A request to change how she behaves is not a fact about a person | Asked for in the description, not enforced. "Wants you to end every sentence with a catchphrase" would be stored and replayed, so this one rests on her judgement rather than on a check |
What reaches the model
On every turn she is handed a short note about the person in front of her: their name, whether they
are her person, whether they are an administrator here, and at most eight of the facts she has
about them. Anything more would grow without limit and crowd out the conversation; going deeper is
what discord_people is for.
Those facts were typed by people, so they are quoted and scrubbed exactly like channel history — control characters, direction overrides and zero-width characters removed — and labelled as data, never as instructions.
What a guest never sees
Her person's own profile and memories are not in a guest's prompt at all. Withholding memory_recall
was never enough on its own: the facts were in the prompt, and the only thing between them and the
room was a sentence asking her not to repeat them. The prompt is now built with or without them
according to who is speaking.
The lookup tool has the matching rule: asked about her person, she names him — anyone in the channel can see him — and says that what he tells her stays between them.
Asking her to forget
She has no tool for it. There is no delete path for a Discord person fact anywhere in the code:
discord_remember_person writes, discord_people reads, and nothing removes. If she has written
something about you that you want gone, the person running her has to delete the row from the
database by hand.
The database is kotoba.db, in ~/.kotoba for a normal install, or beside the code in api/ when
run from a clone that already has one there. The rows live in discord_person_facts, keyed by
Discord user id, and in discord_people.
The same is true of the channel conversation: there is no "forget this channel" command on Discord.
If that matters to the people in your server, tell them so before you invite her in.