Personas

What a persona is#

A persona is more than a personality. Alongside the instructions that set its tone, it bakes in the model it runs on and how deeply it reasons, so picking a persona picks a whole way of answering rather than just a voice.

• Name and picture. What it is called in your server, and the face it answers with.
• Instructions. The prompt that shapes how it writes and what it should or should not do.
• Model. Flash, or Pro for harder questions.
• Thinking. Low or High. Every reply reasons at least a little, so there is no off.

A persona can also carry connectors, which give it tools the built-in set does not have. See Connectors.

The persona hub#

Personas live on the persona hub, a website separate from the dashboard. Running /personas in Discord posts a link to it. Sign in with the same Discord account you use in your server and you get four things.

• Browse. Every persona anyone has published. Open one to see what it is and who wrote it.
• Saved. Your own shelf. Saving a persona is what makes it pickable when you start a thread, in every server you share with Xertron.
• Your servers. The personas belonging to servers you are in, including ones kept private to a server.
• Your personas. The ones you wrote, with the editor.

Persona editing used to happen in a Discord modal and no longer does. Five fields with no way to see a face, and no way to see anyone else's work, is a poor place to write something.

Writing one#

Anyone signed in can write a persona. You do not need Premium for the hub itself, and you do not need to be an admin. You do need to be a member of the server you are writing it into, which is the same bar Xertron already uses when it offers a server's private personas to its members.

The safety review

Every save runs a quick review of the name and the instructions. A persona that reads as an attempt to override Xertron's own rules, or to push it somewhere Discord's rules do not allow, is turned down with an explanation of what tripped it.

On an edit, a persona that fails review leaves your previous version exactly as it was. A rejected save is never a lost persona.

Because the review is a real check rather than a pattern match, saving takes a few seconds.

Private or published#

A persona starts private to the server it was written into. Anyone in that server can use it, and it takes one of that server's 10 private slots.

Publishing it shares it with everyone. From then on anyone can find it under Browse and save it to their own shelf, and it stops taking one of the server's private slots. If a server's slots fill up, publishing or deleting a persona frees one.

Only the person who wrote a persona can publish, edit or delete it, whoever else is using it. Deleting one removes it from the shelf of everyone who saved it, so delete is worth meaning.

Using one#

Pick a persona when you start a thread. The persona option on /startthread suggests your saved shelf plus the current server's own personas, and the choice sticks to that thread for its whole life.

Custom personas only run in threads Xertron started. In a regular channel it always answers as the server's default, whatever you have saved. The Start a Thread right-click action has no options, so it uses the server default too.

Your server default#

Every server has one default persona, and it is the one persona a free server always gets to use. It answers in regular channels, and in any thread started without a specific persona chosen.

Admins set it on the dashboard under Bot profile, not on the hub. That screen also holds the bot's name and avatar for your server, its accent colour, and the connectors the default persona carries.

Nothing a member writes on the hub can touch it. A persona someone writes into your server starts private and counts toward the server's 10 private slots, and its author is the only person who can change it.