Admin

Chatbots.org global planning

2011-02-21T11:54:36-06:00

During the past months, I’ve promised a lot on the forums on the future of Chatbots.org. Yes, we have huge plans, but we also have priorities. Here’s our list of priorities:

~~Synonym project~~
~~Link Manager Module~~
~~University listing~~
~~Research tab (=version 2.7)~~
~~Companies sub tab (version 2.8)~~
-Forum upgrades (version 2.9)
-New home page (version 3.0)
-Wiki & Chatbots.org Chatbot
-Entertainment tab
-Chatbots.org events
-Chatbots.org chatbot contests
etc etc

We hope to deliver version 3.0 mid 2011.

In between: animation forum board, speech forum board

~~Synonym project: we’ve identified 126 synonyms of the word ‘chatbot’. This list will be published soon (probably with 2 weeks)~~

Link Manager Module: this module allows us to manage all external links. With more than 8000 members, we have a huge amount of external links we need to manage. We’ll process invalid links, http errors and links to unsafe or bad website. We’ll come up with some smart solutions.

Overall Performance of chatbots.org Very Low

2012-07-07T10:55:46-06:00

Over the past few months, the time it takes for any given page on chatbots.org has been steadily increasing. This post shows that the problem has been pretty wide-spread, geographically, with complaints coming from both Europe and the USA. For myself, I’m seeing “page load times” that vary from 5 seconds to well over a minute, depending on the time of day. That amount of time to load a page is slower than a dialup connection, when I have a 25Mb/second connection, so there’s definitely something going on that’s creating these delays. Additionally, I’ve recently been getting a lot of alerts from pingdom, letting me know that chatbots.org is down. These “down times” are relatively short, lasting no more than a few seconds in most cases, but they’re also indicative of a problem, and the two could very well be related. I think that this is a critical issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. If there’s anything I can do to assist, I’m more than happy to jump in and help.

Editing lockdown?

2013-02-18T18:09:34-06:00

Greetings,

As much as I enjoy being a member here and being able to pick some brains, make new friends and such, there is one main thorn that keeps “jabbing” me from time to time.

For reasons unknown to me and perhaps several others, we have an inability to be able to edit our own posts after, I don’t know for sure, maybe a half hour or such.

I do know that the next day after a posting, I re-read it and realized that I had a typo. While typo’s might not seem to be the “end of the world” as we know it, typos can often leave the gist or even the main premise of one’s message missing or flat! Sometimes we think faster than we type, leading to omissions and other mistakes.

A lot of people try to take pride in the ability to express themselves on a public forum. Unlike some, I write on the fly…that is, I do not read through a posting then while offline try to craft a witty response to post when back online. With me it’s WYRIWYG (What You Read Is What You Get).

If there is a really good reason for limiting the members’ ability to edit their own posts, I’d be interested in reading it. Hopefully, things are secure enough so only the original poster is able to edit his or her own posts (aside perhaps, from an Admin if need be).

While I don’t expect the management / staff here to bend any rules in my behalf, an explanation would be most appreciated.

Flying by the seat of my keyboard, I remain,

- Art -

Spammer

2012-08-08T19:24:35-06:00

Dear friends.
Spammer found.

http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/974/

URL’s with single quotes in them “break”

2012-07-03T09:56:31-06:00

In this thread, Merlin posted a link to Wikipedia in which the URL contained a single quote. the URL (minus the protocol, so that it doesn’t generate a link) is:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog

When the link was created, the single quote was removed from the URL that the link points to, causing the link to point to a page that does not exist, and the displayed link label has the single quote replaced with an accent mark.

I’ve tried replacing the single quote with a URL encoded replacement (’% 27’ without a space), but got the same results, so I ended up having to create a “redirect” script, upload it to my website, and alter Merlin’s link to point to that redirect script, while displaying the URL for the wiki page. the displayed link label still has the single quote replaced with an accent mark, but at least the link now ends up taking anyone who clicks on it to the correct page.

I’m noticing that, within this post, all single quotes are being replaced with accent marks, regardless of whether they’re in the context of a URL or not, so that must be a “global” thing.

Problem with profile picture uploads?

2012-02-15T09:42:42-06:00

I tried to update my profile pic, but it doesn’t appear to be showing up. The picture uploaded successfully—I can see it when I click to crop it. But it doesn’t appear in my profile or on the forum.

Some attached files fail to download

2011-11-25T21:50:59-06:00

Andrew Smith has a post (found here) in which he attached 2 files:

1.) eng.grammar
2.) the-country-of-the-blind.xml.zip

The zip file downloads quite well, with no problems at all, but the other file’s link just opens a blank page. I’ve tried several times to download the file in different ways (e.g. same page, new window/tab, “save location as…”) with basically the same result. Just a blank.

I suspect that this is due to a failure in the script to determine the correct mime-type for the file, and so simply dies without any output. If this is the case, perhaps assigning the mime-type “text/plain” may resolve the situation with a minimum of hassle. I realize that there will be times when this approach will give unexpected results, but it’s better by far than having folks get a blank page for their efforts.

I’ve suggested to Andrew that he either zip the file and attach the zip file, or change the extension of the file to .txt and try it again. The second method would be best (renaming the file), as it will possibly help to diagnose the problem.

Inactive bots.

2011-11-12T09:30:08-06:00

I enjoy chatting with all sorts of bots and seeing what innovations others have come up with. However, when I search bots using the picture galley I see a lot of listings saying, “This chatbot is no longer available!”

I understand the significance of maintaining inactive bots for historical purposes, so might there be a way of separating the active from the inactive the way it’s done at some lists where inactive and lost bots are categorized?

Web page preview/submit problem

2011-11-06T05:56:22-06:00

In the last few days, when I attempt to preview or submit a response the web page often does not return. Although the page is successfully updated the web browser never finishes the process and returns to the forum.

browser=Opera

[ u ] tags do not underline, but italicize, instead.

2011-11-01T09:23:37-06:00

While creating a post in one of the threads, I wanted to emphasize some text by underlining it, so I used the [ u ] tags, as I should have. Except in the post, the text was not underlined, but italicized, instead. Please see some example text, below:

BOLD
ITALICS
[s]STRIKETHROUGH[/s]
UNDERLINE

Each word above is enclosed with the proper BBCode tag to create the desired formatting. As you can see, underline is being italicized, and strikethrough is completely missing. I’m sure the latter is intentionally being excluded from implementation, but I’m guessing the incorrect formatting is just a glitch in the script.