you can stop it replying by adding ### to your post.

Yeah, I know. That isn't quite what I meant, I dont just want it to shut up, but I want it to be quiet for everyone, all the time, unless triggered by someone asking a direct question from it and then active for a defined period of time. Kind of like sleep & wakeup commands.

hey guys,

looks like a great script, but i'm getting this when i run bootloader.

followed the directions and everything, ran the sql file and it made the new tables in mysql.

Loading startup.xml

Warning: fopen(../board/alice/aiml/startup.xml) [function.fopen]: failed to create stream: No such file or directory in /home/slicedwa/public_html/board/alice/src/admin/botloaderfuncs.php on line 508
could not open XML input

thanks

edit: repost, sorry

edit: repost.. stupid mouse

sorry

I do agree, right now the poor bot on my forum is being used alot, though I know eventually the novelty wuill wear off and being able to do something along those lines will make this great bot one of the best and most enjoyable I have ever added to my forum.

Exactly Wolfman, this is a great hack with a ton of potential, but as it stands at the moment, it's only value is transient entertainment. It *will* get boring and I would think most people will end up turning it off. That would be a huge shame and a waste of an amazing piece of code. We need to make it useful, to give it a purpose. Imagine if the bot would only respond to you if you addressed it directly by name.

e.g.

Me: Bot, what is the capital of Russia?
Bot: IIRC Martyn, it's Moscow.
Me: Thanks, Bot.
Bot: You're welcome.

Triggered by it's name, it responds, but the rest of the time, it's totally silent (well, maybe you could program in for a few random replies throughout the day, just for interest). If we could do this and had a good database of Q&A stuff, you could let the bot have acess to every forum. You would never hear from it, but it would monitor the forums 24/7 and as soon as it was triggered, it would respond.

As it stands at the moment, ALICE is designed as a 1 on 1 chat bot, so it responds to everything, all of the time. It will always have 50% of the postcount in any forum open to it. Entertaining for a while, but eventually, it's just gonna be spambot!

It needs to have it's rules tweaked to be more appropriate for an open forum, rather than a 1 on 1 chat scenario. Poeple could still chat with it, but they would need to address it directly in order to trigger a response. You could also set it to monitor for other "keywords" that trigger a response.

OK, I've spent a little time looking at this and think I understand a little better how this thing works.

One thing in particular it would seem that the extent and breadth of the AIML files determine pretty much how smart the bot is. I think most people are a little dissapointed with the default set. But... looking at the aiml set, I notice there are a couple of files that do not seem to belong to the default set.

std-65percent.aiml
std-pickup.aiml

The rest all begin with either numbers or the alphabet. It seems as though these two additional files add something to the personality of the bot.

Well, I checked out http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=43190 which is the download url for the original PHP program e, you'll see at the top, there are two sets of aiml files. It would seem that the two files I mentioned above, have been taken from one set and combined with the other. The interesting thing is that there are another 33 files in that set. I'm wondering if those additional 33 aiml files can be simply added to this hack to make a bot that is halfway clever.

Does this make any sense.

I'd really appreciate someone who knows what they are on, checking this out.

These extra files look a helluva lot like bolt on topics, or personality enhancements.

Here's the extra aiml files I mentioned. I've just added em in ADDITION to the original ALICE aiml files and re-ran botloader.php.

First impressions are that the bot seems smarter - or at least knows more.

I have absolutely no idea what these extra files do to the server load, or db size. But they do seem to work (I think).

I have a question that is only partually related to the bot.

My users use the "new posts" link alot and during a switch of styles I had to re add that to the board. Well since then I have added this bot and my post count has more than trippled. This means when they click on the "new posts" link they will be getting all these posts in this one forum I have the bot in. Which so far is only people having fun and does not really offer any real info.

Is there a way I could limit the search of new posts to everything but this one forum? if so what is the easiest way to do this. I just prefer simple over complex.