Demo bots and the control panel

For IRC operators. The open rooms (#lobby #general #random #music #food #tech #games #movies #memes #books) and #ConferenceRooms are kept lively by scripted bots (tools/mockbots.py, documented for administrators in docs/MOCKBOTS.md). They are not AI, they say they are bots when asked, and they follow the room's rules.

The control panel

Send a bot a private message. It checks with WHOIS that you are an IRC operator before it obeys. Each command applies to that bot's room; put ALL in front for every room the same program runs.

Example: /msg harlan SPEED 2, or /msg harlan ALL PAUSE.

The head bots

Every open room has a head bot: a registered nickname that owns the room in ChanServ and is always opped by it, plus a co-head on the room's access list. "Premium" bots carry the conversation with visitors.

If a person holds the only ops in a room the bots started in, the head bot cannot register it; within a couple of minutes of that person leaving, the room starts over by itself with the head bot first.

How they behave

• Slow and uneven: typing time, quiet spells, a busier evening, the day of the week and the season show in what they say. Rooms differ in size (#lobby has the most bots, #books the fewest); the busy rooms talk more often.
• A visitor who says hello gets a welcome by name from a different bot each time (remembered for an hour). A question gets an answer, a link gets a thank-you, a flood or shouting gets a gentle word.
• They listen before they answer. Lines a visitor types within about four seconds of each other are answered as one thought (LISTEN_SECONDS). A small built-in "light mind" (plain Python, no model, a few hundred KB of memory) works out what was meant: a kind of question (opinion, recommendation, choice, time, a sum, who/what/why/how), or news, a mood, a plan, something that happened, a liking, a complaint; it answers about that, uses what the visitor said ("how was the concert?"), and understands "why?", "really?" and "and you?" from the line before. Nothing it says is a made-up fact.
• Clean language: every line is checked against the network's banned word list (the one the ircd filter reads, reread when it changes) and dropped if it would trip it; a visitor's rude line is never answered or repeated (a gentle word at most, once in five minutes).
• Permanent hosts: the host and co-host of each open room use a fixed, registered nickname (NickServ account created and identified by the bot itself; the password is kept only on the server, readable only by its owner). The host registers the room with ChanServ (+r, MLOCK +nt-sp, KEEPTOPIC on) and gives the co-host access, so ChanServ ops them whenever they join. In #ConferenceRooms the founder must add the bot with /cs aop #ConferenceRooms add <nick>.
• Premium bots: fifteen of the permanent bots are the "premium" ones: the smartest bot of each open room (its registered owner), the flagship's host and the co-hosts of the four biggest rooms. They carry the conversation with visitors: a visitor is handed to the room's premium bot and stays with it while they talk, it answers every line, thinks faster, and makes no typos; the other bots chime in less.
• The head bot knows its regulars: each room has a saved roster of who is voiced (about a quarter of the room) and who is opped besides the head and co-head. It changes slowly (one regular every one to three days, a new op regular every third change), so regulars seem to come and go; the head looks every few minutes and fixes at most one thing, mostly through ChanServ. Visitors are never voiced or opped by the bots. ROSTER shows the list.
• Topics: each open room has 22 topics and the host changes it every 4 to 20 days (random, and a restart never changes it early). #ConferenceRooms is never touched.
• Their own client: every bot answers CTCP VERSION, SOURCE, CLIENTINFO and USERINFO like a real IRC program (mIRC, HexChat, irssi, BitchX, WeeChat, OfficeIRC, ircII, EPIC, Textual, Konversation, KVIrc and more) with its own version and system, the same each time it returns.
• Moderator scenes (ops and voice handed out and taken back, a joker kicked) only run in rooms where a bot holds ops. #ConferenceRooms belongs to a registered owner, so there the bots do not hold ops.
• Optional: a small local language model can be plugged in (LLM_URL, off by default) for direct questions; its answers go through the same clean-language check and fall back to the light mind.
• Changing them (words, rooms, how many bots) is a change to the program on the server, not a services command: see docs/MOCKBOTS.md.

Next: Operator tools.