Decide on a way to distinguish bots & users

[dlqqq]

Problem

Currently, the YChat API doesn't make a distinction between users connected from a browser & bots connected from a server extension.

Proposed Solution

Add some way to distinguish between human users & server bots in the return type of YChat.get_users() and other similar methods.

We should also consider renaming this method to YChat.get_clients(), since a client may be a user or a bot.

[brichet]

Thanks @dlqqq for opening this.

Although I agree with the need to distinguish the type of client, I wonder where this should live.

• This information seems more related to jupyter-ai than jupyter-chat itself. We could allow this additional information in jupyter-chat, so that it can be customized in other extensions that use it.
• There are currently some work in progress for a suggestions system in collaborative document (e.g. Support suggestions jupyter-collaboration#292). We could easily imagine suggestions from a bot. In this case, I believe that this information should be define at a Jupyter level, to be used by any extension.

And to complete this issue, we should also consider that bot users may come from the front end, e.g. https://github.com/jupyterlite/ai.

[ellisonbg]

There is a use case in Jupyter AI that would be unlocked by having this field in the User data model. We would like to enable any human users to delete the chat message of any non-human user. To implement this without allowing humans to delete other human's messages would require the information to be present in the UI for message deletion in Jupyter Chat, because the delete message logic is in Jupyter Chat rather than Jupyter AI.

[andrii-i]

Hi folks. I've opened PR #214 addressing this issue. Please give it a look if possible.

[andrii-i]

For context, I've closed #213 and opened #214 because bot parameter makes more sense logically and semantically if by default we assume that all users are humans.

For example, check if message editing should be allowed:
if (!(message.sender.human ?? true))
vs
if (message.sender.bot)