I now understand the history and reasoning for LPP, thanks for the clarification and it makes perfect sense in that context. Sorry for my less than measured initial comment on LPP. I would be very interested in the set of use cases any chat protocol for the loebner would need to meet.
As one possible alternative I would like people to consider XMPP.
XMPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP) is the widely used ( google talk, apple ichat, Facebook, etc ) and open ‘Jabber’ protocol. It has libraries for any language you can think of: http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/libraries/. It’s whole purpose is to be a text chat protocol. It’s an open standard that is maintained and evolved by IETF. Using the libraries it’s trivial to hook a bot up to any XMPP network.
Judges could use one of the many out of the box jabber clients to interact with the various participants and it would be fairly simple to guarantee bots were doing the talking on a closed network controlled by the competition organizers ( ssl using competition supplied and installed certs for example ).
And most of all - people who could get their bots to communicate over XMPP would have something very very useful - the ability to be a jabber client on most chat networks in the world.