I think helpful fellow monks with constant connections might be glad to host another's bot. In particular, if you were to write a bot, Nuance, I'd be glad to leave it running for you on either of my machines for the duration of the contest. I don't know how many monks I could do this for but probably lots of help could be enlisted if there was need.

My concern for the contest is the number of submissions. Maybe an addendum (sp?) could be made to only accept 16 (or some reasonable 2^n || 2^n-1 threshold) entries so that the chatterbox isn't oversaturated and worthlessly cluttered/unusable for the duration of the contest. If somebody asks some FAQ question which clearly is the point of the contest, all the bots are gonna respond and that can be a lot if lots of bots are spouting. Sounds like fun though. TTFN & Shalom.

-PipTigger