Robert Basic has continued his series looking at using Dbus in PHP with this latest post to his blog - using the foundation he's created before to make a chat bot that will listen and respond to commands on a Jabber network.

Now that we know how to use DBus to communicate with Pidgin from PHP and how to listen to DBus signals, it's time to put it all together by creating a simple chat bot! Nothing fancy, just a simple script that runs somewhere on some server and, by using a Pidgin account, can respond to some basic queries we send it.

His new code listens for an incoming message on the "PurpleInterface", grabs the name of the sender and calls a "PurpleConvImSend" method with the conversation object and the message to send. You can find the complete source for the project on his github account.

Matthew Turland came across someone having an issue running his PHP-based IRC bot (Phergie) an an environment where the exec function wasn't allowed:

This causes a warning in the Quit plugin, which uses exec to automatically detection of the full path to the PHP CLI binary on non-Windows systems that it will later use that path to initiate a new PHP CLI process to "restart" the bot.

It check this setting for the future, it was recommended that he look at the SPL ReflectionFunction class (a part of the Standard PHP Library) that would let him check the disabled status of any PHP function (looking at the result of the isDisabled call).

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

Matthew Turland set out a while back to develop a bot in PHP. The result of it is Phergie an "an IRC bot written in PHP 5 with an OO API" that can be extended with components for a wide variety of features. Another pleasant offshoot from his project is this first part of two articles on the C7Y community site detailing its creation.

The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.

Matthew talks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.

Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.

I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.

The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The admins over on the PHP-GTK Community site have announced a new resource PHP-GTK ircers can take advantage of - a new bot that hangs out in the #php-gtk channel over on the Freenode IRC network with an aim to be as helpful as possible.

The PHP-GTK.eu community site is now host to an IRC bot named Gataka (for "GTK"), helping users on the Freenode IRC channel for PHP-GTK, at irc://irc.freenode.net/php-gtk.

Currently is has an API interface (for PHP-GTK elements), user tracking and the ability to learn factoids. They're even starting to look for input regarding new features (log publication, in this case).

PHPClasses.org is spotlighting another package from their site today - this time it's a CAPTCHA class that takes things a step further and introduces animation into the mix to make it even harder for bots to get through.

Laszlo Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.

Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all.

You can check out the class here, including a sample animated gif file and a download of everything you'll need to get started.

There's an odd little application that's been brought up that's written in PHP with one purpose - obfuscating an email address/HTML so it's very difficult for a spambot (or other harvesting program) to get a hold of the content and add to its list. The Obfuscator takes in an email address and, with the click a button, spits back out the obfusicated code.

They're also offering the source for the application so you can get behind the scenes and see how it works. It definitely does a good job at making things more difficult, but I'm not sure how useful it really is in practice. If you're just using it to drop into a one-time kind of location, it would work, but the results this thing spits out would be a nightmare to maintain (especially the HTML).

One good thing, though, is that too the user, it all looks seamless. There's no funny characters or things they'd have to change in their browser to get it to work.

In this posting included on the Issociate.de site's Newsreader, there's talk of a "massive phpBB hack" that might be taking place.

During the last few days a bot using a name FuntKlakow, has been registering to at least hundreds (maybe thousands) of phpBB forums.

Ok, what is a danger? Next time the phpBB announces a critical vulnerability, the bot would have everything ready (just a post click away) from attacking thousands of sites/forums.

It's an interesting situation and, as suggested in some of the comments on this digg post, will be interesting to see what happens. It is a little odd for that many items to come up on a search for the name that are only profiles for phpBB boards, especially given phpBB's track record...