[qznc]

Our group uses a chat bot, which plays silly games at random times. Sometimes the challenge is like "Say thanks to somebody to earn some points". Those points are useless gamification tokens, but maybe it helps to encourage gratitude. There was always somebody who took that challenge so far.

[pjlegato]

Rather, it encourages people to become good at simulating gratitude in a plausible manner.

It devalues the entire notion of gratitude to engage in that sort of petty manipulation. Gratitude is rendered into a base and superficial thing.

[qznc]

Now that you mention it, I think that maybe our team spirit was better when we had regular Quake matches... ;)

[maneesh]

That's cool! Which bot?

[qznc]

Custom. We started with a small Jabber bot framework. Then migrated it to IRC (and terminal for testing).

We cannot publicize all the plugins we made. If we rip out the plugins, it is just a bot framework like many others, just with less features and more convoluted code.

Ok, our filter mechanism is probably unique. We can switch the bot to various german dialects like bavarian, swabian, etc. Works similar to http://rinkworks.com/dialect/works.shtml but changes bot output instead of web pages. It was fun for a week and now nobody uses it anymore.

I once tried to migrate our plugins to Errbot [0], but then decided it was too much effort for too little gain.

[0] http://errbot.io/