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RookChat

RookChat is an open-source HTTP/CGI-based chat room that webmasters may download and install on their web sites. It features dynamic multi-room capabilities, public/private/moderated rooms, multi-lingual support by user, many administrative levels, memos, memo lists (similar to mailing lists), graphical smileys, bot games, and over 75 commands for chatting and administration. RookChat requires a UNIX or Windows NT/2000/XP with Python 2.1 or greater.

Available Bot Games

Here is the list of bot games available for RookChat at the present time. All of these are available in the basic RookChat install package.

Other EntertainmentBots

Additional Bots

Besides the above bot games, the following bots are available which can be useful tools for room moderators.

Bot Game Development

Want to write your own bot? A bot development toolkit is provided for developers who wish to write their own bots. This toolkit is but a single Python module with most of the functions bots will generally ever need, so making your own bot is normally only a matter of writing a single module that makes use of the toolkit.

Programming a bot is not simple, but nor should it prove to be overly difficult for those with a reasonable level of programming experience. How much is "a reasonable level"? Well, it depends on what you want the bot to do. The good news is that, since there are so many bots already available, it may be that all you need to do is copy the bot that is most structurally similar to what you want to do, then just change what needs changing. For example, to write a bot that asks timed questions and keeps score, just take take MathBot or BlitzBot, rip out the question generation routines, and replace them with your own.

If you want to do a bot that does something fundamentally different than any existing bot, that will take more effort and programming experience, again depending on what it is you'd like to do.

Note that RookChat and its bot system are open source projects, released under the GNU Public License. The source code for new or modified bots should be made publicly available. The simplest way to do this, of course, is to provide a link to it on your web site. Releasing it under the GNU public license allows you to distribute the source code while retaining copyright.

If you do write a new bot, or significantly enhance an existing one, I would love to see it! Please contact me at sam@rinkworks.com and let me know about your bot! In some cases (though I won't do this without permission), I may even want to include your bot in the main distribution. If enough people write new bots that I can't include in the main distribution, I'll open up a bots page here and link to the bots that other people have written, so it's important that you let me know about any new bots you have created.