Some stuff about this (from the author of phoo and operator of irc.theforrest.org).

Phoo is not a chat bot, so don't expect much conversation from it. You need to address it to get it's attention. When talking on a channel, addressing him means the first word in the line is "phoo". When you engage in a private conversation with him (assuming your UI supports it), you will not address him by name, just give him commands.

Regarding the BBS, he only knows how to search it and return links, like so:

phoo: search bbs for <some terms>

You can specifiy how many results you want returned (default is 10) like so:

phoo: search bbs for <some terms> {max=5}

the curlys are literal (required).

Same for google:

phoo: search google for Mark Lord {max=5}

google will only ever show 10 at most -- limit of the google api I am using.

Pretty much any command you can do in IRC, you can do via email. Just don't address him by name (it's implicit), i.e. an email to [email protected] with the subject:

search bbs for Mark Lord {max=50}

The slashdot command takes the max param too:

slashdot {max=5}

If you're going to do lots of playing with phoo, please start a private convo (or use email) with him so you don't spam the #empeg channel :-)

Questions are welcome. I am readying the code for a soureforge release. It is written in java and has a plugin API.

Cheers,
rjf&