Personalize Your Bot with Custom HTML Skins

You can personalize your published chatbot by uploading an HTML file which will be sent to users who visit your published bot.

Your page must include two things in order to work properly:

A form where the user can enter text to send to the bot.
A place where the bot's last output will be inserted

Data Entry

The form where the user enters data can be as simple as this:

<form method="POST"> <input type="TEXT" name="input"> </form>

The important points are

The form must use the POST method and it must not specify an action attribute.
The field where data is entered by the user must be named "input".

Bot Output

You specify where the last bot output is to be placed by inserting the string !OUTPUT! somewhere in your html page.

Tracking Conversations

Pandorabots normally tracks individual conversations by placing a cookie on the client's browser. If the client's browser is not setup to accept the cookie, an alternative mechanism is through a hidden form variable within the form. This hidden form variable is created automatically if you're using the standard Pandorabots response (ie. no customized HTML), but if you create your own customized HTML page, you need to include the marker !CUSTID! somewhere within the form (as shown in the example below). Without this, the hidden form variable will not be included in your pandorabot's response, and conversations will not be correctly tracked if the client's browser does not accept cookies.

Full Example

Here is a sample page;

<html>
<body onLoad="document.form.input.focus();">
Welcome to my bot
<br>
<font color="green">!OUTPUT!</font>
<br>
<form method="POST" name="form">
!CUSTID!
say: <input type="TEXT" autocomplete="off" name="input">
</form>
<br>
</body>
</html>