Hi all,
here's a brief update on recent conversations and developments on the BBCPersian.com news bot.
1. A Jabber version of the bot is online at "
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
".
I tried it with a number of different Jabber clients, and "proper" support for Arabic/Farsi and BiDi rendering seems rather patchy (although I have to admit there is the possibility that my bot is not sending the correct info to make this work, in which case I am grateful for suggestions...).
Here's the summary of some tests I did with Windows Jabber clients:
- the one client that works beautifully, and handles BiDi correctly even in messages with mixed English/Farsi text (i.e displays English LTR and Farsi RTL):
Gaim (I used v2.0 beta2)
- clients that render the text ok, but don't orientate the overall message RTL (so the text is OK, but not right-aligned):
Psi, Exodus, Google Talk, Gajim, Pandion, meebo
- clients that don't even seem to render the Farsi UTF-8 text properly (although maybe there's some settings to fix this, I haven't spent too much time with this):
Miranda IM
Haven't tried other clients or OSs yet.
2. Support for other IM networks:
Consensus appears to be that Yahoo IM is popular in Iran, so a Yahoo bot would be useful. My current problem is that I can't find a working Yahoo Messenger Protocol Perl module (the ones on CPAN seem out of date and not functional). If anyone here knows of a working YIM Perl module, please let me know (the bots are implemented in Perl).
3. Push or Pull?
When developing the previous (English) newsflash bot, I came across a problem with the MSN switchboard when sending out a large number of newsflash messages. I worked around it by staggering the sending of messages, but the problem may well re-appear if large numbers of users make use of the bot (on MSN at least). This problem is caused by the MSN bot requesting too many active switchboards when it initiates the conversation in order to send the newsflash, so is not an issue in a scenario where the users initiate a chat with the bot (I had around 2000 users over a couple of days on the BBC TV schedules bot after it was posted on Betanews and Microsoft Watch, without any problems).
In order to minimise potential issues like these (if there ever are large numbers of users), it may make sense to turn the bot from "push" to "pull" - i.e. you contact the bot to get the latest news, rather than the bot sending you the news headlines on a regular basis. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions on this.
Thanks,
Mario.
