Subject: XMPP Robots in chatrooms

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:00:22 +0100

The XSF's primary chatroom (xmpp:[email-masked]?join)  
has, for as long as I can remember, had a bot present which responds  
to certain carefully crafted utterances with responses containing  
useful information.

As some people have already noticed, on [email-masked], one  
of my colleagues (Kevin Smith, the XMPP Council's chair) has put this  
bot adapted to service queries about IETF related documents.

It'll respond to several verbs, including "cite", "rfc", "id", and  
"xep". These all take either a reference, or a search term.

Verbs and arguments are either inlined into other discussion by  
enclosing in [], or else are the sole thing in a message by prefixing  
with !.

It's most useful when the chatroom is actively being used for  
discussions, but to give some potted examples of how to use it:

[14:25:20] brian.bnsmith: !rfc 4041
[14:25:20] XMPPBot: brian.bnsmith: rfc4041: requirements for morality  
sections in routing area drafts (april 1 2005) See:  
http://tools.ietf.org/html/4041

[17:57:03] dwd: !xep 45
[17:57:06] XMPPBot: dwd: XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat is Standards Track  
(Draft, 2008-07-16) See: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html

[17:57:28] dwd: And I need to mention [cite randomly] here.
[17:57:49] XMPPBot: dwd: rfc748: telnet randomly-lose option (april'  
day='1 1978) See: http://tools.ietf.org/html/748

"cite" will search all of RFCs, I-Ds, W3Cs and anything else it can  
find in the citation indices at http://xml.resource.org/

Have fun, and please let either Kevin Smith <[email-masked]>  
or myself know if you have any feedback.

We'll keep it running throughout IETF week at least, and if it seems  
useful, beyond.

Dave.
-- 
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