NAME

Infobot - Popular IRC bot

SYNOPSIS

cd infobot;
mkdir brains;
perl scripts/create_database.pl brains/factoids.db

./infobot infobot.conf &

DESCRIPTION

Infobot is a personal or group assistant, originally designed for IRC. The original Infobot implemented a sort of artificial intelligence by learning information ("factoids") from IRC channel discussions, and the responding intelligently to queries about that information. Through plug-ins, the Infobot can also interactively query all sorts of other data sources.

While this is a developer release (and thus UNFIT FOR ANY PURPOSE), the eventual goal of the 1.00 release is to maintain feature (and bug) parity with the 0.43 release, on a considerably more modern code base.

Other major new features include complete independence from IRC, a robust and well documented plugin system that's very simple to develop for, and asynchronous IO throughout. As such, it's also an excellent platform for developing all sorts of other bots.

END USER INFORMATION

The rest of the documentation in this file is meant for infobot developers. Please view the docs/ directory for information for end-users.

DEVELOPER CONSIDERATIONS

The application is put together in such a way that almost everything should use Infobot::Base as its subclass. Methods should return 0 on failure, and 1 on success. An object's new method should just instantiate, nothing else - leave any setup for init.

METHODS

start

Infobot->start( 'config_file_location' );

Loads all the specified components specified in the configuration file and starts the POE kernel. Returns on shutdown.