A.2 what happened to the mailing lists?

B.1. How can I put my Pandorabot on my own web page?

Pandorabots is a bot hosting service and the bot must be published at Pandorabots.com. However, you can embed a Pandorabot within a frame on your webpage. Create an html frameset containing a frame with:

<frame src="http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=....">

B.2. What link can I give to others so that they can talk to my Pandorabot?

Click on the name of your bot on the My Pandorabots page and you'll be taken to page which will show you the link(s) through which your published bot can be accessed. If your bot is not yet published, you'll need to first publish it. You can do that by clicking on the "publish" link on this same page.

C. Botmaster Control

C.1. Training my chatbot doesn't seem to be having any affect. Why might that be?

Firstly, after specifying an alternate response, try re-asking the same question using the Training interface (you can simply click on "Ask Again"). If that works then the AIML for your bot has been correctly updated. What you then need to do is publish those updates so that clients talking to your bot via the published URL will see the changes. You can do this by clicking on the name of your bot to get to the summary page. On this page you should see some text like this:

“You have made changes to the pandorabot since it was last published. You must republish the pandorabot to make these changes available for others.”

D. Instant Messaging

D.1. Does Pandorabots support Instant Messaging Services?

D.2. What are the issues involved with supporting Instant Messaging and what options are available on the free server?

Supporting various IM protocols poses difficult challenges because each one requires custom code and moreover it seems that most protocol interfaces undergo continuous undocumented change. One way to lower the burden and cost of maintaining an IM service for Pandorabots would be to allow all pandorabots to communicate with other IM clients (on variety of IM networks) by connecting to them through our own XMPP Server (meaning: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol server - and formerly known as a Jabber server - see wikipedia for more details) via a Gateway. However this approach leads to another question: How can one manage user accounts on the XMPP Server? Also we still have to maintain the service in the face of the many changes (protocol changes and other types of changes) occurring in other IM networks - and this is very time consuming. In short, at the time of this writing, we are unable to allocate sufficient resources to offer a comprehensive IM solution for the free server.

E.1. What HTML do I cut and paste to put my Sitepal Pandorabot onto a web page?

Unfortunately the way the integration between Pandorabots and SitePal is designed, it's not possible to simply cut and paste some code into a page on your own site. Basically the page serving the bot's responses must come from pandorabots.com. However, there are several ways you can achieve the affect that you want. Take a look at:

F.1. The conversation logs for my Customized HTML bot, consist of lots of separate 1-line conversations. How can I fix that?

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. 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.

F.2. How can I show the recent conversation history when using Custom HTML?

The default “Plain Text” appearance of a published bot includes the recent conversation history. When using a Custom HTML file you have complete control over the appearance of the published bot. In order to show the conversation history you have to include some special embedded AIML in your Custom HTML file.

Inserting a <template> element in a Custom HTML file causes the AIML interpreter to evaluate the template in the current bot context (ie with all the predicates and using the current that, and topic contexts). It then inserts the result of evaluating the template into the published HTML page.

Combining this feature with the full power of AIML template processing allows us to create the following Custom HTML fragment which will result in the inclusion of the 4 most recent user inputs and the bot's responses. Just add this code to your Custom HTML file where you want the conversation history to appear.

<template>
   <think>
      <set name="_history_1"><request index="1"/></set>
      <set name="_history_2"><request index="2"/></set>
      <set name="_history_3"><request index="3"/></set>
      <set name="_history_4"><request index="4"/></set>
   </think>
   <condition name="_history_1" value="*">
     <i><b>Human:</b></i> <request index="1"/><br/>
     <i><b><bot name="name"/>:</b></i> <response index="1"/><br/>
     <br/>
   </condition>
   <condition name="_history_2" value="*">
     <i><b>Human:</b></i> <request index="2"/><br/>
     <i><b><bot name="name"/>:</b></i> <response index="2"/><br/>
     <br/>
   </condition>
   <condition name="_history_3" value="*">
     <i><b>Human:</b></i> <request index="3"/><br/>
     <i><b><bot name="name"/>:</b></i> <response index="3"/><br/>
     <br/>
   </condition>
   <condition name="_history_4" value="*">
     <i><b>Human:</b></i> <request index="4"/><br/>
     <i><b><bot name="name"/>:</b></i> <response index="4"/><br/>
     <br/>
   </condition>
</template>

The predicate and condition elements are used to avoid showing blank history elements at the beginning of a conversation. The contents of the template could be trivially changed to change the order of the history (recent to old versus old to recent), the amount of conversation history shown (up to 10 interactions), or the layout of the conversation history. Just remember that within the <template> element everything must be valid AIML - consequently it most be valid XML - so any HTML tags must be XHTML-like. For example, note the <br/> element. Using simply <br> (ie without the /) will not work. (If you use the Pandorabots on-line Custom HTML editor, it will catch this when you try to save your Custom HTML file.)

G. AIML

G.1 Can I change the name of my Pandorabot?

You cannot change the name of the bot as it appears in the list of bots in 'Botmaster Control'. However, you can change the bot's name for the processing of any AIML templates - this is controlled by the value of the 'name' property.

To change this, from 'Botmaster Control', click on 'Edit', change the property 'name' and click on 'Set Bot Properties'. If you then ask your bot its name it should reply with the new name.

H. Technical

H.1 What is a "botid"?

The botid is is that part of the Pandorabot's published URL after 'botid='.

For example, the Divabot linked to from the Pandorabots home page has a published URL of:

H.2 Is there an API allowing other programs to talk to a Pandorabot?

Pandorabots has an API called XML-RPC that you can use to connect third-party software to our server. The XML-RPC has been used to connect Pandorabots to a wide variety of third-party applications, including Mified, mIRC, Second Life and Flash.

You may interact with Pandorabots as a webservice. Pandorabots offers consulting services supporting arbitrary web services for premium services customers. Please contact sales@pandorabots.com for more information.

A client can interact with a Pandorabot by POST'ing to:

http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk-xml

The form variables the client needs to POST are:

H.3 How can I integrate my Pandorabot into a Flash component?