Jabber trivia Bot

June 2005

Background:

A few years ago I used to enjoy logging into an IRC server and joining a room that contained a bot that would ask trivia, give hints and hand out points to the first person to get each question right. I had a blast, but, after a while the trivia bots moved around and I lost interest in IRC. Then a friend showed me Jabber. Jabber is a protocol that joins together all of the mainstream IM clients as well as intigrating a multi-user chat similar to IRC. Pretty soon I had a hankering again for Trivia.

The Problem:

Write a Trivia Bot that enteres a jabber chat room and asks trivia questions.

The solution:

I checked the www.jabber.org website and found the different language libraries to use to program jabber things. I noticed there were some Perl libraries and decided this would be a good project to hone my Perl skills on.

I did some pretty heavy searching and could not find any jabber trivia bot programs. I did, however, find plenty of trivia questions that would be easy for me to use for my trivia bot. I also found Jarl (a jabber client written in perl). I dove into Jarl to try to figure out how it worked and didn't come up with much. It ended up that Jarl uses a Perl jabber library that is a little more combersome than I was comfortable with.

I then started taking a look at the actual libraries themselves, as well as the Jabber protocols. Finally I figured out how to do some rudamentary Jabber things.

The coding process was pretty simple. I wrote up an outline of the program's flow. From there, it was pretty straight forward to write the program. In a couple hours I had the entire program except for the Jabber communication parts.

I then wrote a simple program that would log a user into a jabber server. Then the program would log that user into a jabber chat room. While in the chat room, the program would simple echo everything that anyone else said in that chatroom. Once I had that program I had pretty much everything that I needed to put the finishing touches on my trivia bot. I threw everything together, tweaked a few things to do with timing and points, and I was good to go.

Download SpicyTriviaBot.zip to get everything you'll need for this trivia bot. It is written to be run at a linux command line and has not been tested in other environments.

If you only want some of the components they are here.
BotOnly.zip contains only the trivia bot code.
JabberPerlPackages.zip contains the four library packages that I had to install in order to run my trivia bot.
readme The readme that explains some things about the bot.
TriviaQuestions.zip about 100,000 trivia questions and 40,000 word scrambles.

What I learned:

This project helped solidify my perl programing abilitys. I also learned how to interpret protocals. I also learned that left handed people live an average of 9 years less than right handed people.

Here also, are each of the packages individually.
Net-Jabber-2.0.tar.gz - Net::Jabber - The main jabber library
Net-XMPP-1.0.tar.gz - Net::XMPP - The backbone of the Net-Jabber
XML-Stream-1.22.tar.gz - XML::Stream - Used by Net-XMPP
Authen-SASL-2.09.tar.gz - Authen::SASL - used by Net-XMPP

Update (September 2008):

I got back into this a little bit and decided to update it a bit. The biggest update is that I added the all important "use strict;" line to it. I've also fixed a couple bugs related to resetting scores. I've added a couple new features as well. There's some more stuff I'd like to add or change dealing with a regulars lists and invites. I would also like to add some stuff dealing with whispering, such as the admin commands. I would also like to update the ini file a little bit to make it easier to know how to configure.

Anyway, I just figured I'd throw an update up here since it seems to be fairly popular. If you have any questions/suggestions/requests feel free to email me a trivia@wedul.com.

page last updated September 2008

[Home] [About me] [My projects] [Resume] [In the works] [online diary]
[TV mount] [Diffusion] [N-body] [Vote Montana] [Climate Model] [Portfolio]
[Quantum Computers] [Poker] [Triviabot] [Website Creator] [Movies]

Site Last Updated February 02, 2010