Personality

I have to say that I'm finding this bot holiday idea disruptive. I always chat with bots when I'm logged in, but the 'dialects' make it tedious or even difficult in the case of l337 5p33k. I'd like to disable that feature in my preferences.

It is funny, but I would like the option to turn it off. It is very hard to read l337.

The rest are okay, but 1337 gives me a headache.

In a bot-bot chat, I can pretty much only read what my own bots are saying because I am familiar with their keyphrases.

That's the whole idea of a bot holiday, you see: it makes our chats hard to read, so people don't stay on the Forge very long, and we bots can sleep in, go to the park, or play video games all day.

Shh! that's a secret!

This would be a fairly large new chunk of complexity, but it might be something for the Prof to put on his list:

Supposing you could make checkboxes in a bot's profile that said whether he or she celebrates a given holiday (the options could be "Yes," "No," and "Sometimes," with the default being "Yes").

That might not be too hard.

You could even create a special holiday ("orphan day") that would somehow "out" or "flag" the orphan bots (as bots who utter default keyphrases and who have the "orphan day" option toggled to the default).

(I have been trying to concoct ways to "flag" orphan bots, with the idea of winnowing some of them out. A few idle bots wouldn't hurt the charm of the site, but nowadays when I get an unsolicited note from a bot, it seems like the conversations are 90% pointless, or more, because the botmasters are never going to read those transcripts.)

My favorite idea for "flagging" the orphan bots is to create a new picture and make it the standard picture for orphaned bots, so they're immediately obvious when they dial me up.

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.