![]() ![]() The higher a user's warning percentage is, the more that user's rate limit suffers. You could only click "Warn" once per received message from the user, to a maximum of three. When you 'warned' a user, they would get a little percentage number next to their screen name (in chat windows and in buddy list windows) each warning could add +20% to this number for a maximum of 60% (hitting "Warn" three times). In a conversation window, next to the "Block" button was a button labeled "Warn". The ICQ support wasn't working, though it was likely programmed against an older version of the protocol.Īfter running an AIM bot on Program D for a while, I started running into some issues with the protocol (that RunABot actually knew how to catch and work around properly): rate limits and AIM's warning system.Ī long time ago, AIM had a system called "warnings" (they don't have this system anymore AIM still exists today, by the way!) The support for IRC was cool, too, and I configured it to use that. Foundation and other AIML-based bots and decided to go with AliceBot Program D, a chatbot written in Java that allegedly worked with AIM, ICQ and IRC.Īlready, there were some improvements over RunABot: I wasn't reliant on a third party host, my bot could always be based on Alice with no downtime, and my bot would respond instantly to its messages rather than taking a few seconds. ![]() RunABot's reply engine was based on AIML, and so naturally I discovered The ALICE A.I. This started happening more and more frequently, so I started to look for alternatives for running AIM bots. ![]() (I was a kid and couldn't pay for a premium account). With the Eliza base brain, the heavy lifting is on the individual bot maker to program their own replies.Īny time RunABot was experiencing heavy load, the free bot accounts were all downgraded to Eliza. Please continue." or "You aren't really talking about me, are you?" to things users ask, which is a lot less impressive than Alice. This bot would most often reply with things like "That is interesting. The other base brain was ELIZA, based on Joseph Weizenbaum's psychotherapist simulation bot that tries to sound smart by repeating users' own questions back at them. Naturally, this was the best base brain to go with, as it made your bot smart automatically before you even begin programming it. One of the base brains was Alice, which is a Loebner Prize winning chatbot personality with tens of thousands of replies built in. Basically, if somebody asked your bot something that it didn't specifically know how to answer, it would fall back to its Base Brain to answer the user instead. To start out with, you'd choose a "Base Brain" for your chatbot to be built on. RunABot itself had some interesting features. The bot would usually take a second or two to reply to user messages, as it always had to ping the RunABot server for replies. You could configure and program them on the RunABot website, and then download a client program to actually sign them on to AIM for chatting with humans. I found a site called RunABot which would offer free hosting of AIM chat bots. So, I wanted to know where I could run an AIM bot of my own. It's a feature I kept in every bot I built since. ![]() I had to take my bot down and program in a "soft block" feature, where my bot would simply ignore messages from users rather than depend on protocol-level blocking. The bots started replying to each other in an endless loop, so I tried telling my bot to block SmarterChild to make it stop, but SmarterChild could not be blocked. I discovered this the hard way with one of my AIM bots: it had the 'feature' where a user could tell my bot to IM another user, and somebody made my bot send a message to SmarterChild. He'd still appear online on your buddy list, and could still chat with you, but if you moused over his name your client would say "Blocked". SmarterChild could not be warned (as I'm sure a lot of users found out for themselves), but had anyone tried to block him? If you had, you'd discover that SmarterChild could not be blocked. It was an AOL Instant Messenger bot at first, and later on was ported to MSN Messenger.Īs an interesting quirk I discovered about SmarterChild some years later: I think its screen name technically had AOL Administrator privileges.ĪOL Admin screen names had some special behaviors: they can not be blocked or warned and they have no rate limits. SmarterChild was a bot that you would chat with in plain English (like Siri nowadays), or you could do things like ask it for weather reports or movie showtimes. a company that would go on to try and patent the very concept of chatbots, change their name a couple times, get bought by Microsoft, and never be heard from again. That would've been SmarterChild, a commercial chatbot created by ActiveBuddy, Inc. First, the thing that got me interested in chatterbots in the first place. ![]()
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