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| Muppetbot Info and FAQ |
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Q: Is this part of JDate? A: No, I wrote this puppy in November of 1999 and I am sharing it. I have emailed JDate about putting the pages up on their server as an official part of their site, other people have emailed them, but I haven't heard from anyone official. They have tried numerous ways to block muppetbot, despite several campaigns to get them to make it official. If you want to email them to not be scared of change, I would very much appreciate it! Dont forget to mention that it would be a free service to them. Q: Why must I bookmark the geocities page instead of the actual list page? A: I dont have a permanent home for the list pages. The current list page server works great but I've been shut down once and will probably get shut down again. If the pages move, I'll just update the links on geocities.com to point to the new location. If you bookmark geocities, once the geocities links get changed you'll be back in business and not have to ask around. Also, if the bot engine gets blocked or shutdown permanently I can leave a note on geocities saying what happened and why. Q: How come Muppetbot doesnt show my new name (age,etc)? A: Muppetbot caches the jdate data for three days. Your new attributes will show up after that amount of time. This is to prevent muppetbot from pounding the jdate site every minute to look up the data every refresh. Q: How come Muppetbot only shows most of the peope in chat, and not all? A: Muppetbot tries to filter out the hackers. Those people who you think are real, well ... they're not!! (but if you would like to argue you're real, please email me and I'll fix the problem) Q: Who is Muppetbot? A: Bot == Web Robot == a program not a person. It's part of the system used to create the whos-on-chat pages. Muppetbot no longer lives in the chat room, the JDate block prevents that, but the name remains... Q: How did you crack jdate / eshare? A: I ain't cracked nuttin'. All the information on the pages is assembled through the front door -- I don't have any special passwords or backdoor access to the data. All the data shown is obtainable via a web browser. In fact, it was obtained by a bot that acts just like a web browser. Q: How does it all work? A: There are two bots that work together. First, Sparky's bot lists the people who are in chat and hands that to Muppetbot, who acts like a web browser and looks up the chatter's profiles. The data gets fed to an engine that assembles the information and spits out the whos-on-chat pages and charts, which are transfered to the server site once a minute via ftp. Q: How did Sparky help Muppetbot? A: When JDate removed HTML chat, Muppetbot lost its ability to see who was in chat. Sparky's bot already spoke Java chat, and now it grabs the list of who's in chat and feeds it to Muppetbot, who then builds the pages. Q: Who is Sparky? A: Sparky runs SparkyBot and lives in New York. He is also a computer geek like me, only much younger! His site is at http://www.twentyfoursix.com:88/jdate and may be up when Muppetbot is down. Bookmark both of us! Back to the main page | ||
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