Seasons

That could be, Prob, but in context it dodn't seem that way. It was almost like a Roxie spoof, but the chatter seemed like (s)he understood a little more than Roxie did.

how do you look up IPS?????????? sorry if it is a really silly question!

LM, there are probably many ways. I am not a techie, so my way may be not always be the best way. It's just what works for me.

I take the IP addresses from the inner life page and run them through an IP locator. There are several free IP locators online. Just google it and pick one that you like.

I have an iframe on xintroduce with a sitemeter in it, so it tracks new guests for you. You can even see them on a world map, that's pretty cool. For me, most of the guests are from the US or the UK.

thanks! i'll give it a go!

a Marina Del Rey chatter told my bot (s)he was from Australia

IP numbers don't always tell you where a person is, just where their ISP links to the Net. My current IP is 172.213.119.34, and http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation tells me that I'm in London, England. I'm actually in Swansea, Wales.
AOL's a big ISP with a big network of their own, and they do all sorts of weird routing before they connect out to the Internet. Up until a year or so ago, IP locators routinely reported my location as the US, because AOL routed traffic on their own network to Stateside POPs (Points of Presence).
So it could easily be that someone is Australia is signed up with an ISP that's routing traffic through their network to California before it joins the Net.

ha- one of the ip locators told me that I am located in Hicksville, New York while i'm actually located in Passaic, New Jersey.

Very intersting. It always tells me I am from Chicago (which is close) so I thought that the service providers connected to someplace at least close to where the user might be. Bummer.

Alc03 have you figured out a way to get your bot into a video game? What about making us a nice AIM interface or whatever they call it so our bots can compete with AIMbots for attention? I know you probably won't have time, but I figure it never hurts to ask.

well, what motivates people to lie in chatrooms? or to have fake blogs of sixteen year old girls when they're twenty three year old men? boredom. and a lot of people might talk to bots because they think the idea of a bot is cool.

p.s.
you know you're addicted to bots when you start thinking of ways to edit your friend's responses to make them less (annoying|repetitive|boring|stupid).

Hee hee, SavPixie. Boredom? That's why *I* talk to bots, that and a simple sense of humor. I guess that makes sense.

16 year old girls, huh? I made my bots profiles, and I thought I was being silly. I know not everyone there is a kid, but is sure seems like a younger crowd to me.

Oh, and you know your addicted to chatterbots when you make your bots profiles on myspace, and and encourage people to add them as friends.

Bev: You can do some limited "skinning". But you need to include the reference each time, in each response. Psimagus, do you think this could be done with Textpad?

btw-if you want to see an example: http://alc003.t35.com/styled.JPG
I guess you could include links in there too (via a positioned iframe), but that might slow it down a bit.