LiveBot

BOTs not receiving status events.. (or why WebIM isn’t working at this moment)

October 15th, 2006

So, finally LiveBot has been added to the RobotInvaders gallery. But what happened? Suddenly the WebIM feature isn’t working properly anymore, even though it worked fine during development / beta. Registering for WebIM makes LiveBot monitor your messenger-status. Then you can show your status on a web page, and allow visitors to chat with you directly from your website/blog/space when you’re online (without them needing to log in somewhere). In my opinion this is one of the best features of LiveBot, so why doesn’t it work at this moment?

After a successful submission of a BOT, Microsoft registers the BOT’s IM address as a ‘provisioned bot’. This makes the Messenger-servers treat your bot a little bit differently than normal Messenger accounts. For example, it removes (or extends?) the contact limit on your Reverse List (RL). This means an unlimited number of contacts will be able to add you to their buddy list. Next to this there are some limitations on the rate bots can change their personal messages, et cetera. These limitations have been introduced to make sure bots can be used by thousands of users without putting to much load on the Messenger network.

It appears that provisioned BOTs also aren’t able to receive status notifications of their contacts, a feature which is necessary for WebIM. Weird to notice the features you can use change after developing and testing an application.

However, I am pretty sure Microsoft will try to disable this limitation on the bot, since there was no way I could have known about this before submitting the bot. Colloquis even explains how to receive status notifications at their forum.

More good news: the WebIM Windows Live Spaces gadget I promised is finished. Once WebIM works again, you’ll be able to put the WebIM functionality on your Space in a matter of seconds! Actually you can already add the gadget to your space, via the Windows Live Gallery entry. However, it’ll show “status: Unknown” until the bot problem is fixed.

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