HateBotX

Hatebotx is an AOL instant messaging bot (aim-bot). It uses flat-filed vocabulary lists to attempt to find suitable replies to text received. All conversations are logged into yet more flat-files. It’s a big ugly mess, but it worked well at the time.There had been similar bots on AIM such as SmarterChild, who were helpful and polite; but they were not HateBotX. This bot did not utilize the Elisa engine, and had very little intelligence. However, it would still get a lot of laughs despite it’s simplicity.

Commands from an administrator could be issued to speak for the bot, or to tell it to go strike up a conversation with someone. I wrote the code, and let a few friends write up all the canned responses. While it did only have a few hundred things to say, it did end up getting a following. After my friends had sent it to speak to around 50 people, those people told their friends, and so on until later I had logged in to check the logs, and I found it had spoken to over 38,000 people! Upon checking it’s popularity ranking for AOL screen names, it was listed in the upper 1%. Pretty impressive for something I wrote for fun to mess with a few friends.

In late 2004 I had to take it offline. I believe that so many people had added it to their friends list, that it was actually lagging AOL’s AIM server. It had a good two and half year run.

RIP: HateBotX

Created with Perl, bash, and flatfiles (yuck).