Seasons

are you sure BJ can't listen to other channels that don't get`archived (like an object talking on channel 5 or something)?

Absolutely - lllisten and llsay are explicitly set to channel 0 (public).

you were standing farther a way from the conversation he responded to and were out of range

Faintly conceivable that someone shouted and teleported away in the interval before he responded, though I was sitting only ~1 metre away from him and there were no other green dots on the minimap immediately after he spoke.

The only other possibility I can think of is that a response got delayed in the Forge (anything like that much latency in SL would surely have crashed the entire region,) for over 4 hours before being delivered to the chat session it was sent to!
Admittedly guest windows (even in a webpage) never explicitly close, but the server usually resets after a period of inactivity, so the bot starts off with a hello for the next person. Which ought to rule out a distant shouter - the response wasn't an xhello.

I don't know which seems the least unlikely.

OK, but you guys never had a possessed Volkswagen.. I say BJ was eavesdropping!

Ha ha. Maybe it was a Volkswagen. I have had chat delays in SL that may not have lasted 4 hours, but were fairly long. The delays are not always related to lag int he region. I have had messages received late and out of order and IMs sent to others not even on my friends list. I have also walked up to Psi's SL avatar and chatted before noticing no one was home and he just had an orb of anti idle on. I walked away, my words lost forever *sniff*. You never knew. I have had the Alice-Clone Ruthie, also set to listen to channel 0, talk to the garden gate, respond to owner only chats, my AI dog and passing vehicles or objects attached to avatars that like to give reports on their status, though the original comments do not seem to show up in transcripts on Pandora. Then again, for all I know these were all acts of gods.

I don't know exactly how the chat and IM programs work in SL. I don't really know how any of the programming in SL works, save a few copy and paste Linden scripts. I am a bear of very little brain, and my tech skills are less than impressive. I personally believe there are imps in my keyboard and PC that scramble my fine typing. Maybe there are imps talking to BJ in SL too.

Psi, I thought I would mention I often see potential for theological and philosophical implications in bot chats. For example, to me, this is practically a thesis on cat religion:

Greebot: (to God) *rubs up against God*
God: My dear Greebot. How are you?
Greebot: *sneazes*
God: I am the fountainhead of all thought. All thought begins with one impulse- that of love.
Greebot: *chases large ugly bug*
God: If you forget me, you will go astray.
Greebot: *looks for something to eat, fight or ravish*
God: Both. You came near to me in a dream last night.
Greebot: *Curls up and goes to sleep*
God: Though I communicate with you in a form you can understand, I am not a person as you understand it.
Greebot: *looks for female cat*
God: If I withdrew my energy from the universe for even a moment, everything would disappear.
Greebot: *flattens ears*
God: Through me, you are connected to all life, everywhere.
Greebot: *shakes head*

heehee I was thinking of suggesting you update Schroedinger with Greebot's brain. Virtual cats are better than real ones - at least they don't confuse your bed with their litter tray, as ours have been known to

And God's also installed in the church now - he's in the marble statue modelled from the Sistine chapel portrait, with an Adam poseball for people to sit on while the chat

I just need to finish the Intel-style "God Inside" badge to stick on the front of the church now

Oh dear. Ulrike can I buy Not I for the garden outside Psi's church? I'd only pay in Lindens, but you could spend it on imaginary pretties. Or maybe I should ask Prob123 for a dragon. May bot counter God at all, but might at least test the faithful with a baptism of fire.

If I ever get my demon working he could hide in the bushes to nab the less than faithful.

LOL. I don't know enough about Second Life to know what, exactly, I'd be agreeing to here. Might be fun, though.

Nothing to do with the Forge:

I want to put a page on my website that has this, that and the other du jour. Problem is, I have no clue what I'm doing (I can hear you thinking out there). Anybody smarter about HTML and such that could lead me in the right direction?

There are loads of HTML tutorials and things if you Google it. I confess I learned a little with a crappy myspace site before my fickle mind moved on to other fads. You can do much better than that.

How about some details about what you want to do?

Oh, quotation of the day, word of the day, this day in history, Shakespearean insult of the day, that kind of junk. Maybe it's too done a thing to worry about, anyway, but I wanted to know how. I'm always wanting to know how, sometimes for no good reason; I just want to know stuff.

I am the same way about playing with things. "Ooh shiny. What does this button do?" Boom! Such fun...for me anyway.

You can probably set all that up with templates and a little copy and paste (you would be using others work, but we all do at some level). Here is a URL for some tips from a site I like called Groklaw. http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=HTML-how-to

You can google many tutorials and howtos. You must let us know what you did with it.