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I'm a member of a community that has its own Stack Exchange site and I'm wondering where I can find some insight into the rules of creating a Stack App that does the following:

We have a pretty strong culture of asking for development help in various Discord servers, and I want to create a Discord bot that anyone can add to their development help channel.

Whenever you've answered somebody's question inside of a Discord chat and you think it would be a great resource for others on the Stack Exchange site, you could tag the Discord bot and point it to the initial question and the eventually accepted answer, and it would post it to our Stack Exchange for others to view.

Is this allowed? I have searched through the rules and didn't see anything explicitly, but I could be completely missing something.

Also want to mention our site is still in Beta. Perhaps that also plays a role in the rules.

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There are substantial issues.

Legal

The first would be the legal issues regarding content ownership/copyright, licensing, etc. There are a variety of ways you might set up the bot, but all of them have legal issues and/or security issues that would need to be carefully handled. Given that it's not clear exactly what will be happening, it's not possible to speak directly to the situation, other than that the issues are significant.

It's an alternate account and a bot account.

There are all the normal issues with having an alternate account and running a bot. some of which are:

  • The owner of the alternate account will not be permitted to interact with anything the bot posts in ways which would not be possible or appropriate if the actions were taken by the bot owner's account. For example, no posting answers to bot posted questions. No voting on bot posted questions, answers or comments. Etc.
  • As with all bots, the bot owner/operator is responsible for all actions the bot performs, including all content that the bot posts. If the bot posts inappropriate content, then any sanctions imposed by moderators will be applied to both the bot account and the account of the user who is operating the bot, even if the owner of the bot was not the one which directed the bot to post the content. If the user who directed the bot to post inappropriate content can be identified, then they, too, will be similarly sanctioned. The sanctions imposed on the bot account may be harsher than those imposed on the bot owner, but the bot owner is ultimately responsible for all of the bot's actions. Imposing sanctions, of course, depends on the situation and are at the discretion of the moderators/CMs involved in handling the situation.
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  • Hey thanks for the info. I'll take all of the above into consideration. However, based on your reply, it seems that if the necessary precautions are taken for the implementation, this kind of application isn't necessarily prohibited by Stack Exchange rules, correct?
    – Joe C
    Mar 20, 2023 at 17:15

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