Of all the stupid things to come up in chat….

Bots. Y’know, those things that I was accused of not knowing what they are by some guy who got all cranky and emailed me because I posted his stupid IM questions? They come up in chat a lot. They’re a part of chat.

Most of them suck. There are a few that are entertaining, because there are people that are convinced that they’re not bots. Like Erik, Fred’s bot. Not that Fred wrote the bot, he just wrote the ever-expanding response file that the bot uses to hold its ‘conversations’.

Ondo wrote the bot. He also sells the bot…somewhere on this site.

There are other bots. Not so good bots. Like the ones with the ‘one more minute and I’m leaving’, ‘I’m showing honey’ bots with the girly names. And the toyota bots I’ve been seeing — and I should probably take a minute here to mention that the toyota bots are probably not sponsored by Toyota, and they’re probably also not supported by Yahoo.

From what I’ve been able to gather from conversations over the past few days, one of those bots [possibly the toyota ones] is running off the ‘Yahoo Responder System‘ — not the ‘Yahoo Responder Bot’.

I know, it’s kinda hard to tell the difference at first glance, because, hey, they’re bots. Right? And even at second glance, even though they’re at two totally different URLS, because…well, it really seems like the Yahoo Responder System guy just copied everything Ondo had on his website, typos and all, and marked whatever he couldn’t toss into the bot as ‘coming soon’.

There’s something impressively…dumb about all this. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but it should be upsetting. And it isn’t. Ondo isn’t being hurt by any of this, and he seems to think it’s just a little funny. At least, that’s what I’m getting from chat.

And it is kinda funny. The guy copies a website, typos and all, apparently copies a response file [or, at least, the structure of it, though I wouldn’t rule out actual copying], and then sucks at it all. A lot.

I really don’t have much else to say on the matter, except that if you absolutely must use a bot to pimp whatever shit you’ve got to pimp, you should look into Ondo’s bot. It’s just one of those strange situations where the Name Brand Shit is better than the Generic Crap.