[trilOByte]

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.