Today we’re introducing a new member of the Lincoln Loop family, BotBot.me. At the moment, BotBot is beautiful hosted IRC logs (try #django or #go-nuts). We built it for people who love IRC and we want your advice to improve it.
We see BotBot becoming our personal chatroom assistant. He looks things up for you, he sends you reminders, he delivers messages to people when they aren’t available. Our initial focus has been having him remember the chatroom history and tell you what happened while you were away. He’s a replacement for your bouncer with a friendly web interface.
We’ve been happy users of Freenode’s IRC services for our company chat for years (we tried web-based chat services, but they never stuck). Recently, Github’s hubot inspired us to make our chat room better. Being the eternal tinkerers that we are, we decided to build a hubot of our own1. Graham adapted hatcog, his Go IRC client, to watch multiple channels and pass messages to a plugin system we built on top of Gevent and Python. On top of it all, Michael designed an innovative log interface that we think beats the pants off of existing web-based IRC loggers (and looks great on mobile too).
We want to make BotBot better and we’d love your feedback. If you’re an IRC user, we want to hear from you. Are you interested in your own private BotBot? What would make IRC better for you? Email us at beep@botbot.me, chat with us in #lincolnloop on Freenode, or signup to learn more at https://botbot.me.
1We embrace NIH syndrome for our side-projects. It is a great way for us to expand our knowledge and keep up with new technology.