MSN Bot

[KurtWallander]

I'm currently working on a MSN Bot in Freebasic with the winsock library, also used cryptlib for Md5 hashing. FreeBASIC is a great language!

The bot can now go on-line and you can play a wordguess game, ask for the latest headlines of some newssites (CNN World, a dutch newssite, site from a soccer club) and play a "slot machine" game (all things are text based so don't expect much).
So it works, but it's far from finished, some mayor problems that need to be fixed:
- the login is not safe, since I did not know how to do SSL in FB (so now the user-password combination goes in plaintext to login server)
- if there are no conversations the bot is disconnected after a while
- i'm not sure how it handles multiple conversations at the same time, only tested with one or two at the same moment. I expect problems with that

I don't have anything concrete to post yet, the sourcecode is messy and needs to be cleaned up and generalized (it is now specialized for only my own bot, needs to be more customizable), but after that I could submit some parts if people want to so they can make their own bots.

I know it's not the first MSN bot, but I didn't know of any of such projects in FB. If anyone knows more freebasic MSN projects I'd like to know.
What do you guys think of such a project?

[mambazo]

thats a brilliant idea, perhaps you can make an include out of it so that others can use it! I have alot of AIChatBots here, and I did once try to write an MSN bot with AI in mind, but failed miserably.

The AI part works fine, but it wont connect to msn!

[KurtWallander]

thats a brilliant idea, perhaps you can make an include out of it so that others can use it! I have alot of AIChatBots here, and I did once try to write an MSN bot with AI in mind, but failed miserably.

The AI part works fine, but it wont connect to msn!

yes The MSN protocol is complicated, I can only connect to MSN because I found the right information on the net (even if you manage to get on-line you still need some keys to respond to challenges, without those keys the project was doomed) Also I don't know how long ago you was working on the project but MS did a big protocol change once, all protocol versions below MSNP8 were dropped. I had a hard time connecting to MSN as well, but it works now, my bot uses MSNP9.

I like the idea of an include but I need to get some more information on that because I don't know much of creating libraries. Furthermore before I make an include at least the security problem (passwords in plaintext with HTTP on port 80) should be fixed. I'd better submit the code somewhere around here so people can see how it works and / or improve it. But before that I need to clean up the code :P, it's mostly in dutch so I should make function names english and also english comment lines would be nice I guess :P

[mambazo]

Great stuff, I'm sure you'll get a great response - I'd imagine many people here would gladly help out.

[Jim Barlow]

Aren't these Bots just IM SPAM? A royal pain in the a$$ for people who use chat rooms?

[mambazo]

with msn though, its not really chatroom based like irc.

you'd have to connect to the bot by adding his address to your contact list. he can't just grab at people at random. well, he could i guess, but it would be an even more royal pain in the a*s to code! :)

The only way he could spam someone, is if the programmer knew exactly the msn addresses of how ever many people.

[KurtWallander]

with msn though, its not really chatroom based like irc.

you'd have to connect to the bot by adding his address to your contact list. he can't just grab at people at random. well, he could i guess, but it would be an even more royal pain in the a*s to code! :)

The only way he could spam someone, is if the programmer knew exactly the msn addresses of how ever many people.

And the people that are added by the bot must accept "him" as well or there is no communication possible.