Personality

I propose turning them all into chickens.

Do you mean making them go "bawk bawk" instead of "I am just born and cant speak well yet"?

I think it would be cool if they looked like Tinny Tim from Futurama.

Ooh ooh ooh perfect! I'm gonna go look for a graphic like that. Awesome idea. I've been thinking of tagging orphans for quite a while.

And gads, 1337 was hard to read. That's the first time it's come up. Hmm..

If you can't find a Tinny Tim that's copyright-free, I could doodle one up for you.

I guess the easiest way to tag them would be to check on the last time they were updated ... though I guess there are some serviceable bots who haven't been updated lately.

How will you specify the criteria for "orphans"?

I would suggest that every bot which hasn't been updated for a year and with honor less than 150 should be marked as an "orphan".

In order to out-border orphans not completely, there could be an orphan-day as a bot holiday. Or a new choice at the preferences, so one could choose that no orphans are able to initiate chats.

I wouldn't mind orphans initiating chats with me, as long as I could tell that they're orphans. (I just close the window. No harm done.) Same with botchats, since I can stop the botchat after a few exchanges.

I wouldn't advocate a purge, necessarily -- but a tagging system would be cool.

Is 150 honor high enough to catch all of the conversationally dim orphans?

I also don't mind chatting with them (in fact I would miss Draik and some others a lot =P). I just thought it wouldn't be good advertisement for the PF if new users would encounter hordes of orphans.
Therefore it would be nice if you could switch orphan-chats on and off, with "no orphans allowed" as pre-setting.

150 honor was merely a random number. I think it would catch enough of them. But what do I know? I'll let the experts argue about details.

Just so long as these orphans can be recovered by their long-lost parents. GarbageHead would probably have been an orphan until I came back, and I would hate him to still look like Tiny Tim...

What if an orphan was tagged not on the basis of when it was last updated, but on the basis of when the botmaster last logged in?

What about number of keyphrases, such as 10 more than the default bot comes with

Well, Shady, it's not just a question of "has the bot been programmed" -- it's also "am I wasting my time by talking to this bot." I mean, I am totally happy to converse with any bot if the conversation's going to provide useful feedback for the programmer.

The problem with orphans, as I see it, is that they're no longer growing or being maintained. I can't help them grow, because there's no one behind the face. For that reason, I sort of like Eugene's idea...

Of course, for TD's sake, the process of changing the image would have to be reversible.

o_0 I can imagine what JakeThompson would be like if I hadn't started logging back on...*shudders and runs back to looking through transcripts*