Infobot
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Infobot is an early IRC bot written in Perl by Lenzo and others. The bot's main goal was to remember URL's and associate them with a descriptive name, so whenever someone needed a specific URL they could ask the bot. For that reason, the first Infobot had the nickname 'url'.
Athough the main project is now inactive, many forks from the original program were made, some of which are still active. Most of these forks carry extra features, such as googling a phrase given through the chat and saying the results of the query as messages directly in the chat.
The Infobot works by a method of factoids. It stores information in its database by connection a phrase with its definition, usually an informative short line. It records its information by constantly listening to the chat. It states its factoids when it recognizes a question in the chat. For example:
<someone> wikipedia is http://www.wikipedia.com/ The Infobot at this point silently remembers the statement <someone> wikipedia? <infobot> somebody said wikipedia is http://www.wikipedia.com/
Because of its ability to store statements and re-state them with ease, many IRC channel operators use an Infobot to store information such as the channel rules so they could easily give them to newcomers to the channel.
Using its automated replies, Infobots are also often used as an entertainment bot, giving humoristic replies to certain queries. For example, to prevent the Infobot from saying 'X is Y', the key word '<REPLY>' is used, to have this effect:
<someone> dumb bot is <REPLY>stupid human <someone> infobot: whats up? <infobot> huh? <someone> dumb bot <infobot> stupid human
Newer Infobots have additional features. Most of the involve connecting to websites. For example, some bots have a 'weather' module. So someone can ask the Infobot the weather at a certain address, and the Infobot will connect to a weather site and report the up to date weather on the chat. Infobots are also useful as calculators, currency convertions, and many other things which you would otherwise have to open a site for.
Infobots running the original Infobot code have become less popular on IRC now, mostly because of the inactivity of the original project. One of the popular forks of this project is blootbot.