There were some internal discussions prior to the bot introduction, I don't know if there was any plan to make an official announcement, I'll let the other staff members see if there was anything to publish from this.
Basically the bot asks for information that the moderators almost always have to ask themselves, wasting time for both moderators and users, as moderators cannot help further without this information and users end up waiting for a human, just to request obvious additional information and then waiting again for the next time a moderator visits the forum.
The bot is programmed to only post if the php flarum info
output was not included. If it's included, then the bot will not reply.
For users who don't have SSH access, this is also something they should disclose in their first post, as we otherwise waste time discovering that fact, or even discover they are not self-hosting the forum, in which case we are often unable to provide any support at all. It's really unfortunate that it often takes 2-3 back-and-forth replies only to discover a user is on FreeFlarum and cannot be helped. We could maybe add a paragraph about the information we need from users without SSH in the bot reply.