Hi, I get the digest here so sorry for the lack of quotes/threading etc. BTW, what happened to NNTP access to this list? Anyway, two things. 1) Large rosters. I don't see the problem here - why oh why does the server have to parse the rosters of all the people that presence is being SENT to? That's the impression I've got, maybe I'm wrong, but surely to change presence all the server has to do is load and parse that bots roster then generate a <presence> packet for each one which gets sent to the client if they are online or not, or to another server. There should be only 1 roster parse, or am I wrong? Anyway, I agree with Jens that this seems to be a major problem - client or transport the server should be able to happily deal with large scale presence notifications. 2) Command syntax: Yeah, well I see this could be a problem. We can either continue using natural language for this, which is improving all the time but does have problems (as in: it can be difficult to know exactly what or how you can do with the commands/varied syntax) or we can use some kind of controlled input system like HTML forms only different. Here's my suggestion (I'll prototype it when I can): Bots advertise themselves as supporting the commands syntax somehow (in presence?) and when a client that supports it beings "chatting" to this bot, what actually happens is that a special message is sent to the bot requesting the data (or it could be an IQ get/set system). This returns some XML representing the commands that can be used, which are displayed to the user as a series of linked phrases, like this: (i'll use the freshmeat news example here) * Start chat * A window appears that looks like this, here [] means blue underlined text like hyperlinks [select option] * The user clicks on the [select option] link and a menu appears with the Watch and Ignore commands, and maybe others like About etc. * The user chooses Watch * The window changes to read >From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source. [ and ] * The (edit) is just a text edit so we can type in the words we want. The and ] link gives us more options, like "and, send me a daily digest", "and, send me XHTML formatted news items" etc. The user wants both of these options, so they click the first [and], then choose the option, so it reads >From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source, and send it as a daily digest, [ and ] ... then ... >From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source, and send it as a daily digest, and send it as XHTML formatted [ and ] Now the user has created a request that identifies their needs to the bot, so they click OK or whatever and another XML message is sent to the bot with the data the user entered. The bot returns a text message saying, "Thanks for using PersonalBuddy, I will: send you updates on the (edit) news source, and send it as a daily digest, and send it as XHTML formatted." to let the user know it went OK. The same interface can be used to unsubscribe : [ select option ] > Unsubscribe > [ select news feed ] > Freshmeat.net > OK Anyway, I know this approach has some problems, most notably client support is required which sort of does away with the whole point of IM bots which is that they are like other people and all you need is the IM software, but I believe it -is- powerful and flexible. Also I suppose that for clients that didn't support this or didn't want to use it (ie sent the bot a plain text message) it could go to the natural language interface. Anyway, comments anyone? thanks -mike _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
