FAQ

I'm having problems starting my bot

I get a PANIC message saying my registry is corrupted and that I should run DB_RECOVERY

This procedure should help you find which registry files are corrupt and fix the problem

1. move all your databases (and log.00000.... files) in a different location
2. start rbot (it should now start and create all the databases anew). If it doesn't start, you probably forgot something.
3. shut the bot down and repeat the following procedure until the second point fails:
   1. overwrite one database file with the old copy
   2. start bot
   3. quit bot
4. the last db you copied is (one of) the corrupt database(s). Rename it to something like broken.db and run db_dump broken.db | db_load originalname.db where originalname was its original name
5. try starting the bot again.
6. repeat until all old db files have been copied over and recovered if broken

This should help you set up a functional environment again :)

If you are still having problems, please reopen bug #59 and report there.

My bot doesn't reply when I send him a private message

Most likely, you're using an IRC network which doesn't allow private messages from unregistered users (e.g. Freenode). So the bot is actually replying, but since his nick is not registered and/or it didn't identy, the reply doesn't reach you. Either set your nick to accept messages from unregistered users or make the bot register its nick.

How can I transfer rbot registry to another computer?

1. Use db_dump (it may be named something like db4.5_dump or db_dump4.5; on Debian systems it's provided by db*-util packages) to produce a portable dump of the bdb file.
2. Transfer the dump to the destination computer
3. On the destination computer, use db_load to restore a bdb file from the dump

The attached scripts rbot-registry-dump.rb and rbot-registry-load.rb automate dumping and loading of all rbot registry files.

Plugins

The quiz plugin doesn't work / quiz.rbot cannot be found

The bot ships without a quiz database. You can either look for one on the net, or create one yourself. The quiz.rbot file has a very simple syntax:

Question: some question
Answer: the answer

Question: another question
Answer: the answer to this other question

You can make the bot accept multiple answer to a question by separating them with | (vertical bar):

Question: It's a coalition of 52 states
Answer: USA | United States of America

You can make part of an answer optional by 'gating' the core of the answer with # (hash sign):

Question: It's a coalition of 52 states
Answer: USA | #United States# of America

will accept both USA, United States and United States of America.

The salut plugin doesn't work

If the plugin load fails with a message like:

salut.rb in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rbot-9999/data/rbot/plugins failed with error Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - No such file or directory - ~/.rbot/salut

it means you upgraded from a 0.9.10 version, and the default salut files were not copied over. Copy the salut subdirectory from the data/templates subdirectory of the rbot installation directory to your rbot data directory (usually ~/.rbot)

The dictclient plugin doesn't work

Install the ruby-dict package (http://www.caliban.org/ruby/ruby-dict.shtml)