Cheesy Quintessence

IMGrammarBot is an AOL Instant Messenger bot written in PHP using the BlueTOC class. Its goal is to deal with the catastrophe that Instant Messaging has brought upon the English language... shorthand, horrid grammar, disregard for the differences between words with similar phonetics, and much more. IMGrammarBot is designed to find the most common errors and alert the violator of his or her mistake.

Grammar correction

IMGrammarBot currently corrects nine types of errors. These errors are prioritized such that only the worst error is reported in response to a message containing multiple errors. The types of grammar errors recognized are:

1. Messages containing only a question mark
2. Shorthand ("u," "r," et cetera)
3. Common spelling errors ("mispell," "grammer," et cetera)
4. Questions lacking a question mark
5. Lower case pronoun I
6. Lower case acronyms
7. Contractions lacking apostrophes
8. Excessive punctuation ("!!!!!")
9. ALL CAPS

Of course, nobody is perfect, and IMGrammarBot realizes this. Using a credibility system, IMGrammarBot tracks the number of errors made by everyone so that it may simply ignore errors made by those who infrequently make errors.

Functionality

• Adminsitrative control from any number of screen names
• Chat room auto-join list
• Ability to accept all chat invitations
• Screen name blacklist (to ignore invitations)
• Chat room blacklist (to ignore invitations)
• Avoid list (intended to avoid other IMGrammarBots)
• Log writing
• Versatile output formatting
• Sign on multiple bots, each with independent configurations, and control them all from one bot's command line

Customization

IMGrammarBot was designed with versatility in mind. Because of this, it's easy to do a variety of things to make any bot stand out from the rest.

Templates

Each context (IM, chat, grammar correction, et cetera) uses a different template, allowing for versatile customization of your bot's text.

Languages

Create hilarious new dialects by customizing the language files to change all publicly text, including all correction messages.

Run script

If you know a little PHP, you can write "run scripts" for bots to manipulate the internal data of each bot, based upon is screen name. Each bot can have a different goal or personality!

IMGrammarBot is open source and may be used to run your own grammar bot on AIM. It's designed such that you shouldn't need any knowledge of programming to make basic use of it. You will need PHP 5 to run it, as well as multiple screen names. The README should explain everything you need to know to get started.

If you're ready, download the IMGrammarBot source code (v1.0.0).