Hey! I’ve been quietly working on a new workflow to provide helpful resources for questions. When you post one, expect an auto reply within a few minutes, like:
It also pings people who have helped answer similar questions before.
I’ve struggled with just the right amount of AI to add here. After all, if you want an AI answer, you can talk to one directly - I’ll assume that you’re posting here because you want help from a human. Also, while it would be totally possible to post full AI generated answers, I’m concerned that that would basically turn this forum into a chatbot, and the real community would leave.
Anyway, I’ll let this run for a few days while I collect feedback. Please let me know if you found this useful, or not!
How to opt out from the mentions system
If you don’t like to be called for help, you can go to your preferences and disable this feature.
Hey @bartv I think it would be better if it pinged users active in the last month or two, I’ve seen it ping people that haven’t posted since december of last year!
Hi Bart, I appreciate the goal here, but I want to push back on how the mentions feature was rolled out.
I signed up before this existed, and the first I heard of it was the bot tagging me based on posts I made a year ago. There was no email, no announcement I’d seen, and no opt-in — the default was just “on” for everyone, including inactive accounts.
Analysing members’ post history to profile who helps with what is a new use of our data that we never anticipated when we joined. Under UK/EU GDPR that kind of repurposing is supposed to be built around users’ reasonable expectations, and quietly defaulting everyone in doesn’t meet that bar even if it’s technically defensible under legitimate interests.
Suggestion for the pilot: make the mentions opt-in, or at minimum email affected users before the first ping so people get a choice rather than a surprise. I’ve disabled it in my preferences, but I shouldn’t have had to find the setting after the fact.
In all defense to bart here, how does that affect EU policies, and all the data on your profile is public? Bart announced the forum bot, and gave people a way to opt out, there’s bugs, but its just testing a new feature. I understand the forum bot may be annoying, but not the EU policies thing.
I don’t understand EU policies so I may be wrong, but I’m sure none of the n8n team meaned to do anything like that with your data
No worries, I don’t think Bart or anyone at n8n meant anything bad with this, it’s clearly a good-faith experiment and the opt-out was there from day one. My issue is with how the rollout worked, not the intent.
On the “it’s all public data” point, that’s actually a common misunderstanding. Under GDPR, data doesn’t lose protection just because it’s public. Posting on a forum means I expected humans to read my posts; it doesn’t mean I agreed to my post history being analysed to profile what topics I help with and auto-tag me. Public just makes it easier to justify, it doesn’t make it a free-for-all.
And yes, the announcement + opt-out counts for something. The problem is that people like me who haven’t been active for months don’t see announcement threads, our first “notice” was the bot tagging us. An email before the first ping, or making mentions opt-in, would have fixed that completely.
So to be clear: I’m not saying anyone broke the law, I’m saying dormant users should get a heads-up or a choice before being volunteered. That’s feedback for the pilot, nothing more.
Also, just to be precise: the UK is no longer in the EU, so EU GDPR doesn’t apply there directly. The UK has its own UK GDPR, which is separate domestic law. The EU’s adequacy decisions for the UK were renewed on 19 December 2025, and they now run until 27 December 2031 under a sunset clause, which is what allows EU↔UK personal data to keep flowing without extra transfer safeguards. But that’s a transfer issue , it doesn’t change the fairness point here, where public posts can still be personal data and dormant users should get notice or a choice before being auto-mentioned.
