Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 8:10 pm Post subject: Bot Revival
No idea if this is the right forum or not, but these days who visits enough to complain?
We all know these forums have pretty much died now, the odd one or two ghost posters to ask a question and leave every fortnight or so, but that's it. In all, I count 3, maybe 4 active people. We keep having posts now and again saying "Let's start up a new bot-depot!" but we don't actually do anything.
2003/4 were great years for bots, but why? We had one or two amazing 'big' bots (What ever happened to bot2k3?) and lots of people wanted in on them. Small communities grew, templates were made and bots were born by the hundreds. Thus were the golden years. Why did it all die out? Why can't we bring it back?
I propose we start brainstorming a method of reviving not only BD but the bot scene in general. Try and spark some life in the once great communities dedicated to bots, bring the fun back to messengers. It's worth the attempt, at least. How about one big bot project? A competition? Anything?
Actually, that 'one big bot project' doesn't sound too bad. We could try and reach out to every form of input (Who said bots were specific to just MSN or hell even messengers?). You never know, it could be fun. It would certainly be educational at least - I think I was 12 when we were in the 'golden years', joined around 11, look at me now
Reply with any ideas you can think of, if we get anything good we can take it to MSN.
Probably the 'golden years' of bots were when we were all much younger and had too much free time on our hands. I would've been about 15 or 16 and had all the time in the world to work on bots. Now I have a job and rarely have any time to work on bots. This January I started reprogramming RiveScript (the new module's on CPAN already) and started building a bot site. It's offline right now though because I'm in between web hosts... but even so I don't have a lot of time to work on the site or anything.
I think the bot scene started because of SmarterChild, which was the first well-known chat bot, and everybody wanted one of their own... which would explain why RunABot.com appeared at around the same time, which is where I started with bots, before learning Perl because RunABot was too limiting. But it might've just been a passing fad. _________________ Current Site (2008) http://www.cuvou.com/
Joined: 25 Jun 2004 Posts: 126 Location: Liverpool(home) or Derby(uni), UK votes: 3
Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:56 pm Post subject:
I agree, I started with bots in my first year of college so I guess I would have been 16-17. Now I get maybe 2-3 hours of time to myself after being at work programming all day, the last thing I want to do is more programming. Having said that, I absolutely love programming and I cant imagine what id do if I never got into it. Incidentally, bots are the reason I learned to program in the first place. It seems like the bot scene died when bot-depot got destroyed by accident while it was being upgraded, or whatever it was that happened.
Ive been working on making bots for everything I can possibly make a bot for. Recently I set up one that you can talk to via text message but that developed into a whole different thing. I tried starting up a project to create one bot that would connect to everything under the sun, kind of a super-bot I guess, but that died out as well. I started remaking msn.pm, made a version for MSNP8 that is on google code but I havent had time to do any more work on it lately.
It would be good to get the bot scene up and running again. I recently acquired a new server that I was going to dedicate to running my bots on. I think it will be difficult though, as most people are going to use the agent things instead of actually making their own. We could do with some sort of universal bot forum that will have sections for people using conversagent style bots and people doing bots like we do, and any other form if there are any. That way people could start off with one, probably a conversagent one, and then move on to a perl one, or even vice versa. I think I got into the scene toward the end of the "Golden Years" but I wish they had gone on longer, there was a lot of creativity in the ones that were appearing right before the end.
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