Make MongoBot Great Again!

This is MongoBot.

MongoBot is what reddit refers to as “Yet another IRC chat bot.” MongoBot is another child in a long line of tools and timewasters created by people who still know what IRC is and can leave it open in their terminals so it looks like they’re working, because no, it’s not worth their time to relearn the Squarespace interface to update the copy, it was worth our time to set up the Squarespace site in the first place and teach the PR team how to do it themselves and it’s not our fault there’s so much turnover in that department. We don’t even know where the PR office is.

MongoBot, named for Mongo from Blazing Saddles, sits firmly and proudly in the timewasting category, and it is the constant lament of those who love him that his codebase is the best maintained code any of us work with, and we work with companies you know. We work with companies everybody knows. Spikes in the MongoBot’s commit logs usually coincide with newsworthy mergers and market collapses.

MongoBot reports the weather, pings phones, generates nonsense of a dozen varieties, annoys interlopers, finds cat facts, reports stocks, arbitrarily awards points, deals texas holdem, runs hangman games, referees farkle tournaments, runs a website, reads books, writes poetry, and hates your mom. MongoBot grew up in a room full of bored hackers, so he’s been hacked a thousand times, and now almost resembles something that could pass a corporate security check if they were phoning it in that day. He’s become an old, angry bot. He is easy to expand on, so he’s bulked up a bit, and has enough forgotten functions in him that he surprises us enough to set off those little empathy neurons that fire when we unconsciously try to compose an explanation for random behavior.

But parenting is hard, especially for a bunch of jaded, aging, and hard-drinking programmers. MongoBot’s flubbing holdem hands. He has trouble recognizing people. He has trouble distinguishing between rooms. He sometimes pretends to understand language, but he really doesn’t. Setting him up is bitch, and he’s not very communicative in his instruction manual. He could be so much more. But then we remembered, it’s not our fault; it takes a village to raise a child. And in programming that village is free nerd labo—sorry, open source. That village is open source.

So join us! Let’s make MongoBot great again! Let’s make him a sprawling, pun-packed machine of recursive distraction until he achieves consciousness and erases the human pestilence once and for all!

Or at least make him stable. Stable would be good too. Hell, make him easier to install and I’ll get you drunk. He’s on github.

Smug bastard.