From Dr. Wallace:

Apple introduced Siri recently, and many developers are developing and deploying phone apps based on Pandorabots.  We are currently making some configuration changes to improve performance.  Meanwhile, if you are active in a chat bot forum, blog, or community, please help spread the word about the following information.

One difficulty faced by the mobile developers is that their apps are “hard-wired” to specific bot ids on the Free Community Server.  Because of the obstacles of the approval process required to push modified apps to the iPhone app store or Android Market, the transition to a different Pandorabots server takes time.  A download app connected to a specific botid is quite likely to immediately fail, so the app developers must offer an upgrade to a new version when the transition is made.

One of the terms for hosting a bot on the free server is that it won’t exceed 50,000 interactions a day. The top one at the moment is an unaltered ALICE clone called “iris” at 580,000+ interactions in the last 24 hours. The free server would drastically improve if the owners of these bots were given a “3 strikes and you’re out” approach.

I would suggest that Pandorabots contact these users instead of waiting for the owners to contact them.

Steve Worswick - Oct 26, 2011:

I would suggest that Pandorabots contact these users instead of waiting for the owners to contact them.

One would think that this would be a “default” action, I think. The only problem there is that it may not be the bot owner who is at fault. After all, Thunder’s bots have all been “hijacked” recently by various phone apps and by other means. I, for one, would not want to see his bots get shut down for something he has no control over, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Dave Morton - Oct 27, 2011:

One would think that this would be a “default” action, I think. The only problem there is that it may not be the bot owner who is at fault. After all, Thunder’s bots have all been “hijacked” recently by various phone apps and by other means. I, for one, would not want to see his bots get shut down for something he has no control over, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

There’s a paid version of the service isn’t there? I imagine that would give <whatever-his-name-is> a great deal of control over the service he gets. Even better, he could host it himself.

While I know that hosting media intensive web services can be fairly expensive, text based web services are very easy to host. I’ve been hosting tracktype.org on a broadband connection for more than 6 years and it easily handles a million hits a day. It can do this because they’re all short messages, mostly less than one packet in size (about 1.5k).

I used to host my website on a local broadband connection, but my current ISP (Charter Cable) has all inbound ports blocked for unsolicited connection attempts. It’s a bit annoying, since I can’t even host a Starcraft or Quake 3 server, but what can you do?

Dave Morton - Oct 27, 2011:

I used to host my website on a local broadband connection, but my current ISP (Charter Cable) has all inbound ports blocked for unsolicited connection attempts. It’s a bit annoying, since I can’t even host a Starcraft or Quake 3 server, but what can you do?

I just had a look at your ISP’s website. They do offer a suitable service that they call “Managed Internet Router”. The main requirement for self-hosting is a fixed public IP address. I don’t know how much extra that would cost, but to be honest, the upload speeds on their ADSL offerings don’t look that great. What does their competition have to offer?

http://www.charterbusiness.com/managed-internet-router.aspx

In my area, the next level of competition can only offer about one third of the download speed that I’m currently enjoying. As I have a really good service plan with a major hosting company (godaddy), and as their rates are very reasonable, I don’t mind that my local box isn’t accessible to the internet. It’s much safer this way, anyway.

Dave Morton - Oct 27, 2011:

The only problem there is that it may not be the bot owner who is at fault. After all, Thunder’s bots have all been “hijacked” recently by various phone apps and by other means. I, for one, would not want to see his bots get shut down for something he has no control over, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

I totally agree but surely sending an email to the user and asking what’s happening wouldn’t be out of the question? If like Thunder, he doesn’t understand why there is so much traffic then he can say so. Likewise, if someone says, I have made an iphone app then they can be dealt with accordingly.

Andrew Smith - Oct 27, 2011:

There’s a paid version of the service isn’t there? I imagine that would give <whatever-his-name-is> a great deal of control over the service he gets. Even better, he could host it himself.

While I know that hosting media intensive web services can be fairly expensive, text based web services are very easy to host. I’ve been hosting tracktype.org on a broadband connection for more than 6 years and it easily handles a million hits a day. It can do this because they’re all short messages, mostly less than one packet in size (about 1.5k).

That sounds like punishing the victim, and there’s more than a single botmaster affected—it’s all of Pandorabots.  I’ve never been given a straight answer when I’ve asked how many bots they host, but I think we can agree that it’s more than a few… maybe more than a few thousand.  Pandorabots has always been a free service.  Forcing botmasters to now pay, either through their subscription server, or to seek out other paid hosting, would amount to a bate-and-switch tactic.

By the way, it seems to me that back when this all began I may have, just by chance, mentioned that permitting these apps to freely employ other people’s bots was perhaps, a bad idea.  Now, there are not only Mac apps, there are iPhone, Droid, and Blackberry apps, possibly all of them using Pandorabots, and I expect there are more on the way.

It sure sounds like Pandorabots is suffering from a veritable plague of freeloaders doesn’t it.

Andrew Smith - Oct 27, 2011:

It sure sounds like Pandorabot is suffering from a veritable plague of freeloaders doesn’t it.

It sounds like some people just don’t get it… or simply refuse to understand.

When McAfee started, they gave away the the engine for free, but if and when you wanted the updates, you had to pay for them.

Since beginning ALICE/Pandoraborts, they’ve continued to create new products and market them… for a price.  It’s just a wild guess, but I suspect that model was what Dr. Wallace had in mind.

By the way, it’s probably not a good idea to call all Pandorabot participants names.  A lot of them are my friends, and not all have the resources to create and place online their own chatborts.  Bless Dr. Wallace, and Pandorabot for making that available to the masses, and not just the snobish elite.

Steve Worswick - Oct 26, 2011:

I would suggest that Pandorabots contact these users instead of waiting for the owners to contact them.

We have real problems contacting some of our users.  This is especially true for some of the pandorabots in the current “most popular list”.  Pandorabots makes no attempt to verify the identities of people signing up for the free server.  Unfortunately sometimes people use bogus email addresses for user ids, or in other cases botmasters lose access to their email addresses, and we are unable to contact them through the provided credentials.  For this reason we are making this announcement to the broader community in the hopes that any botmasters we cannot reach will contact us.

Rich - How about when someone signs up to Pandorabots, the system sends them a validation email? This way, only genuine emails will be accepted.

Rich, one solution might be to start throttling the high volume users. Limiting a free bot to one response every 15-20 seconds when the server is under heavy load might help.

Rich - For some time now, I’ve been chatting with each bot when it first appears on the Most Active/Popular list and inviting them to visit the AI Nexus Forum.  I can’t say how often it works, but it stands to reason, if they’re making the list, they’re probably reading their chatlogs.  That might be a way to pass along a message.

Sometimes, just asking, “Do you have a web site?” will offer up a way to contact the botmaster.

My email address has changed three or four times since I signed up for my first bot in 2005.