Chatterbot Updated

15 October 2011

I've just pushed a new version of Chatterbot with a few main changes:

• When doing searches, it no longer includes retweets. I struggled with making this change but eventually I decided it makes sense. Several people have told me that they are annoyed when they retweet something which triggers one of my bots. And I can tell from watching the logs for my bots that people who RT someone else don't really expect anything to come of it. So, no more retweets by default. You can still include them explicitly by adding 'include:retweets' in a search string.
• A nifty new chatterbot-registerscript, which will walk you through the Twitter authorization process, and removes the need to generate any sort of config file yourself. In fact, you don't even need to create a bot first -- the script will output a skeleton bot for you once the authorization is complete.
• A new script with some pretty basic reporting. Run chatterbot-status to get some output of recent tweets from your bots, and totals for the last 1/7/30 days.
• Some other cleanup and bug fixes.