Hey all, happy new year


Anyway, minor problem, I run a small company, and as you might guess, we use Linux.

What I've been trying to find is plugin for Pidgin which acts like a bot, customers can contact us through IM and get an immediate response and if need be, hand over to a human operator. I'd prefer this way then putting someone through the torture of a phone-based bot.

I've looked, but all I can find are anti-bot measures, anyone got any ideas?

Maybe you can check something like this out:
http://hasin.wordpress.com/2008/12/2...t-using-botim/

It looks like they are using PHP and an external library to create bots.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...eply&p=3393537



according to:

http://developer.pidgin.im/doxygen/d...erl-howto.html

( see section under 'Conversation API' )

it would seem that Pidgin itself is programmatically extensible - potentially enabling the writing of a pidgin plugin that could interact with users on the channel or chat service currently logged into

I dont know of a 'fully crafted' solution that does exactly what you are looking for - perhaps this could be an oportunity for a new open source project if it doesnt already exist

I would also tend to look at an open messenger service that can talk to a variety of different messenging services, for example MSN / Google Talk and then write a bot for my chosen server - Jabber could be a good choice and this could long term scale better

googling found this first link to integrating Jabber with MSN:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...60918092954170

but there are other sources and then a bot could talk to incoming inquiries via MSN clients or even a web based client

Perl would be for many the language of choice to write a bot and CPAN would be the place to start

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=jabber&mode=all