In my opinion, the position that bots must never be allowed to utter in the cb under any circumstances is extreme, dogmatic, and unrealistic. My feeling is that most cb users would tolerate some chat from a bot, under some (perhaps very constrained) circumstances. Finding that common ground is the challenge.

For starters, any prohibition on bot chat based on technical concerns is inappropriate, as it is an extremely premature optimization. If one finds bot chat completely unacceptable, there is always /ignore. The /ignore feature can be enhanced to allow some fine-tuning (i.e. conditional /ignore) if there is demand for it.

Secondly, what bots do via private messages is not really relevant to the discussion here, except to the extent that someone proposes a mixed-mode bot interaction. Bots like im2 and cbs are strictly non-chatty, so they're irrelevant, except perhaps as examples of that behavioral extreme.

The reasons some people have given for being against bots sound reasonable enough, mostly, but then, in general, those reasons don't seem to lead to their conclusion that bots should be 100% verboten. Tanktalus' bot idea doesn't sound very useful? Not a reason to ban bots altogether. CB isn't IRC? Bots can communicate privately? "I don't want to hear from non-humans"? These are not reasons to ban bots altogether.

Seriously. We should be able to come up with some parameters of acceptable bot behavior.

For example - I would not be opposed to a bot which utters unbidden after some long period of cb quietude. (Heck, we already have a bot that does that.) Of course, if multiple bots try to do this, there will be contention, and we'd probably have to ask the bot authors to add tighter conditions on when the bot will utter. Another possible mode: a bot could be allowed to reply publicly to a direct query from a user when that user is the only one active in the cb. Or: bots could respond to direct queries when the cb contains only "bot-friendly" users. A user could register herself as "friendly" to a bot by sending a registration /msg to the bot.

I believe we may also need to proscribe user behavior in the brave new world of a chatterbox with bots. For example, we may feel it necessary to define a policy saying "Users should never (publicly) respond to a bot's utterance."