What better place to announce a chat bot new forum, than on another chat bot forum?

Goodbye mailing lists, Hello Forum—

I’m turning 50 and it’s time for a change. The ALICE A.I. Foundation mailing lists are closing down forever. In their place we are launching a new forum at http://forum.alicebot.org.

There are forum categories for Alicebot General discussion, AIML Developers, AIML Style and ALICE AI Ethics, replacing all the similarly themed mailing lists. There is also a new forum category called Free AIML Sets to discuss corrections and contributions to the body of open source AIML.

Significantly the new forum called “AIML The Language” replaces the old AIML Architecture Committee and is now open to all contributors.

The archives of the mailing lists will remain online and searchable. The link to the new archive site will be posted on the forum when it is ready

The mailing lists will officially close on July 10, 2010. No more posts to the Alicebot mailing lists will be accepted or published after that date.

Thank you all for your many years of contributions to and interest in these mailing lists. I look forward to continuing and expanding our conversation over at forum.alicebot.org.

Sincerely yours,

Richard Wallace
ALICE A.I. Foundation

That sounds like a great idea. I only have one slight issue. I’m one of those rare individuals who can’t pass a visual Turing test to save my life most times, and the test image on the register page is the type that I’m absolutely the worst at. It looks more like a test for color blindness than a visual Turing test, and I can’t make out anything intelligible in it. I can live with the “Anti-spam” question, just not the image.

[edit]It took me literally 27 tries to find one that was readable, but I made it. WOOHOO![/edit]

It took me the same Dave. I had to have around 10-15 attempts at it. This may put off other users.

I’m in agreement there, Steve. Perhaps a change is in order.

A while back, I wrote a CAPTCHA image script to prevent spambots from misusing my contact page on my website. It’s simple to use, and much easier to read. Given that even the most complex CAPTCHA script is far from infallible, and given that there are not one, but two turing-esque tests on the registration page, perhaps, as paraphrased from a book I’ve recently read*, “Simple is better than not-simple”. In this instance, I think that Kwaj** is right.

* from the Tamuli, a series of novels by David Eddings
** Kwaj is the Troll god of fire.

[edit]
The CAPTCHA image script I wrote can be viewed at http://www.geekcavecreations.com/captcha.php. The nice thing about it is that it’s fully customizable for size, and uses an encryption algorithm, so that it’s not as easily bypassed by image reader scripts. I won’t go into any further details about the script in public, since I don’t want some erstwhile hackers picking it apart.
[/edit]

Thanks for signing up for the forum.  Would you mind re-posting your concerns about the anti-spambot and CAPTCHA, on the ALICEbot forum itself?  There’s a better chance I can get someone to take action on it if I say, read our forum, than if I try to point them to another forum.

I think maybe it should go under “Random Topics”.  I realize now that I didn’t create a specific forum category to discuss the forum itself.

Thanks!

@Richard: thanks for advancing the chatbot community (again). I’ll check it out the next days, as I’ve just arrived in Atlanta for the AAAI conference (assuming catchup with everone there :- ))

My opinion shared from my experience with forums:

It is possible to not use a CAPTCHA at first to jumpstart a forum
and just manually activate the accounts.  Spambot registrations
generally happen gradually.  So it is not too much trouble to
simply delete a few spambots at first, to make registration fast and easier
for ‘founding members’... Those who have been members from the forum launch.

In most cases, spambots don’t find the forum for the first few weeks.
Once enough members join the forum, then re-enable the CAPTCHA.

The point being that the Site Admin can take the place of the CAPTCHA
because they can manually activate or delete forum members. So it is
advantageous to manually moderate a brand new forum to help build
a following by making the registration process as easy as possible.

A ModeratorBot is more entertaining to watch automatically moderate the forum.
It can instantly disable links and censor foul language in a spambot post and
edit a warning to the spambot into the post text.  Members enjoy “Modbots”.