Bug Stomp

I think you hit the nail on the head with: "This seems an obvious programming method". Yes, unfortunately PF - like AIML, ALICE et al - is closer to template oriented Case Based Reasoning than to programming.

My understanding is that PF was designed to open bot design up to people *without* programming skills. So I put up with the limitations. I'm not aware of a fully programmable web-based chatbot builder open to all for free.

Mick: I think the individual keyphrases look like the best option for now, just because of that bug. However, if the bug was solved, your method would be pretty useful, with the addition of private plugins (for specific things), and then a catch-all keyphrase. That could save some typing, and maybe some response time.

FREE or NOT (and it doesn't hurt to kick some cash to The Proffesor. I am going to as soon as I get my Chatterbox Challenge check) There are no better bots around. The forge is the BEST...Look for better free or not YOU WON"T FIND IT!

This is kind of an odd bug, but it's not consistent. Sometimes shortly after I log in, I will click on something in the right frame, or else in the list just above that frame (that starts with "My Bots") and I will get a message asking if I'm sure I want to log out. So long as I click "No" on that, whatever I clicked on will load up, sans frames, and a new main window will open up.

The only consistent pattern I've noticed is that it only occurs shortly after I log in to the Forge. Once I've been on a while, it doesn't happen. Oh, I'm using Mozilla Firefox, 1.5.0.4, if that's any help.

I used to get that occasionally with MIE, but it seems to have stopped for me since I switched to Firefox. I guess sometimes it just misses the frameset and opens the link in "_top". I've never had it happen on any other sites.

Ah. That would do it. If it's just a browser flutter, I won't worry about it.

Whenever i type hello, my bot doesn't respond right.

Whenever I type hello my bot doesn't say anything right.

Except for the initial greeting, "hello" is ignored by the AI Engine. Generally, the beginning of a convo looks like:

xinitiate (bot starting convo)
xhello (other bot's response)
xnone (unless something in the other bot's xhello triggers a keyphrase)

In the 'Book of AI' there is a link which should take you to a tutorial for regular expressions (end of chapter 2). This link has never worked (I assume due to a bug in the web page). Can anyone direct me elsewhere on the Web where this or a similar document can be found? Thank you.

Indeed - it certainly hasn't been working since I've been here (just over a year,) - I guess the original site moved/closed some time after the Prof added the link. I haven't been able to find anything that appears to be the original via google.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/ is my regex tutorial of choice, with the caveat that it teaches "proper" regex, rather than the rather curious flavour we enjoy here - in other words, don't expect things to work exactly the same (or indeed, even at all sometimes...)

The link did work at first; I looked at it two or three times.