ANN: Butler 1.9 released

[Stefan Rusterholz]

Butler - the IRC bot with class - version 1.9 has just been released.
Butler is an IRC bot written in Ruby. Features include a comfortable
plugin API with some DSL support to enable quick writing of plugins,
thorough localization support,
an access framework that bases on deny-per-default with hierarchical
privileges, user and roles. A configuration framework, user-sessions
(users can be recognized as the same user even if they leave visible
range of the bot), flood controls, automatic paging of answers.
Butler also comes with an administration tool to create, start, stop,
update and delete individual bots, view their logfiles and more.

The 1.9 series marks the beta series of butler2. There are still some
known bugs, but as a whole the bot runs stable (my own instance ran 4
months straight, with the exceptions of restarts after updates).
Help with development is welcome, especially creating new plugins and
testing.
Also butler currently does not work on windows. If anybody is interested
in porting butler to work on windows too, it would be much appreciated.

More information about butler can be found on its website[1] and project
site[2], there's also a quickstart guide[3] to get butler up and running
within minutes. The first steps of a plugin writing tutorial is also
online[4] and will be expanded within the next few days.

Butlers code is dual licensed under GPLv2 and the ruby license.

Have fun with it

Regards
Stefan

[1] http://butler.rubyforge.org - butlers website
[2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/butler - the project site
[3] http://butler.rubyforge.org/manual/quickstart.html - quickstart
guide
[4] http://butler.rubyforge.org/manual/tutorial/plugins/tutorial_00.html
- plugin tutorial

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

Oh and not to forget - if you use butler, don't forget to visit us in
#butler on irc.freenode.org.

Regards
Stefan

 

[Bob Hutchison]

Hi,

Butler - the IRC bot with class - version 1.9 has just been released.
Butler is an IRC bot written in Ruby.

Being one of those who are mostly/completely/almost-wilfully ignorant
of IRC related stuff, I had no idea what an IRC bot was.

For others like me, this will help:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_bot>

then, of course, this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat>

Anyway, after reading these these I can begin to appreciate what
you've done. So...

Congratulations!

Sounds like a fun and useful project. What kind of things are you
doing with it?

Cheers,
Bob

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

Anyway, after reading these these I can begin to appreciate what
you've done. So...

Sounds like a fun and useful project. What kind of things are you
doing with it?

Cheers,
Bob

Hey, thanks for the links and the compliment! I completly forgot about
including some information about IRC itself
I originally wrote butler out of need for a bot with good
multilingualization and a plugin API that didn't require you to write
basic functionality yourself.
For the future I intend to use the bot as a support tool in IRC channels
for my projects. Things like statistics, canned replies, announcements,
FAQ & knowledge bases and whatever you can think of
IRC itself is very nice as a direct support medium. You can discuss
stuff without the delay mails and forums have (though of course they are
useful too, especially if you can't manage to be online at the same time
with your talk partner or to reach a broader audience).

Regards
Stefan

 

[Bob Hutchison]

Hey, thanks for the links and the compliment! I completly forgot about
including some information about IRC itself
I originally wrote butler out of need for a bot with good
multilingualization and a plugin API that didn't require you to write
basic functionality yourself.
For the future I intend to use the bot as a support tool in IRC
channels
for my projects. Things like statistics, canned replies,
announcements,
FAQ & knowledge bases and whatever you can think of

Okay, that's obviously handy.

IRC itself is very nice as a direct support medium. You can discuss
stuff without the delay mails and forums have (though of course they
are
useful too, especially if you can't manage to be online at the same
time
with your talk partner or to reach a broader audience).

IRC is circa 1988. My start in sofware is circa 1977. I live email and
usenet

Why do you prefer IRC over the various alternatives, and I'm thinking
of jabber/xmpp here? I see, from some quick googling, that there's
plenty of partisanship. I understand what you are doing, and the
alternatives will say they can do the same thing. So I'm interested in
what *you* think and why -- you've actually invested in your decision
so, to me, that is more than enough to make your opinion interesting.

Cheers,
Bob

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

IRC is circa 1988. My start in sofware is circa 1977. I live email and
usenet

Why do you prefer IRC over the various alternatives, and I'm thinking
of jabber/xmpp here? I see, from some quick googling, that there's
plenty of partisanship. I understand what you are doing, and the
alternatives will say they can do the same thing. So I'm interested in
what *you* think and why -- you've actually invested in your decision
so, to me, that is more than enough to make your opinion interesting.

Cheers,
Bob

Mostly due to the way IRC is used. IRC is used more in multiway
communications while Jabber and other IMs usually are used for 1:1
discussions. Take #ruby-lang for example - roughly 400 people in there.
I prefer IRC because it is more direct, more immediate. That doesn't
mean I use it exclusively. IRC, E-Mail and forums have each as said
distinctive advantages.

Regards
Stefan

 

[Giles Bowkett]

At my current project we have a Campfire bot. (Campfire ~= essentially
IRC in a Web browser). He's hooked into Cruise Control for continuous
integration so he basically pops in every couple minutes with the
latest commit message and an alert if the build borks.

He's not really a bot, though, because he doesn't do anything
interactive. Initially I set him up as a bot just to test logging in,
posting to the chat room, receiving input, etc. There's an
unbelievably easy gem called Tinder that does all the heavy lifting
for you. His "hello world" was the ability to respond to the sentence
"Surely you're not serious" by saying "I am serious, and don't call me
Shirley."

Chatbots are loads of fun. I once wrote a chatbot in Python to
generate pornographic sentences and named her after a friend who
seemed to have a mild form of Tourette's. Then I IMed the actual human
and introduced to her to the tourettebot and they got along really
well.

One obvious use for a chatbot, if the chatroom's organized around a
Ruby project, is to hook it into ri. Similarly I have a feeling that
if you were to write a chatbot which googled the Rails documentation
it would be tremendously useful.

--
Giles Bowkett

Podcast: http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com
Blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio: http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
Tumblelog: http://giles.tumblr.com