Bots (was: thoughts on new modes (Ie))

[Bjorn Reese <breese@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[ First, apologies for being slightly off-topic ]

On Thu, 26 Nov 1998, Aleksi Suhonen wrote:

> I initially thought that the +I mode was meant to make all bots
> unnecessary.

While the sole purpose of a fair share of the existing bots is to provide
extended protection of a channel (and some features such as timeouts for
bans is even a good thing for the servers,) this is not the case for an
increasing number of bots.

More and more people use bots to provide services that are convenient for
on-line chatting. This includes

 * telling when a certain user was last seen on the channel
 * leaving a message for another user
 * converting between different units (for example Celsius and
   Fahrenheit, or US Dollars and Deutchmark)
 * spellchecking phrases
 * answering FAQs
 * playing games

and I could continue ad infinitum. With the paramounting interest in the
field of Intelligent Agents, I predict that sooner or later we will also
see bots that are participating in the discussions.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that any new feature on the server will
make bots disappear.