Hello! Regular bot dude and IRC/forums junkie Iriche has, after a bit of conversation, decided to give us a nifty new toy to play with - Something that I hope will help out with our ongoing efforts to increase communication between the various roleplayers of Anarchy Online.
Iriche, in his infinite kindness, has set up a bot on both Atlantean and Rimor with a counterpart on the official Funcom IRC server to relay chatter between both dimensions *and* the #AO-Events IRC channel. This means that joining the bot or the IRC channel will let everyone from both dimensions (and those of us that spend more time lurking on IRC) to talk shop, chat about stuff, and in general goof off and do whatever.
To join the bot in-game, simply send a tell to "AORPbot" with the word "!Join" (IE: /tell AORPbot !Join) and you'll be added to the private chat channel. Messages from the other dimensions will be prefaced with the appropriate tag (such as "Atlantean", "Rimor", or "IRC") so you'll know where said message is coming from at any given time.
Of course the main purpose of this bot is so people can discuss roleplaying matters across dimensions easily without having to venture outside of the game to do so or having to worry about being in-character (or, for lazy people like me, to be able to hang on IRC and chat with you guys while you're in-game doing stuff). That said, naturally the conversation won't be about roleplaying 24/7 so expect a wide variety of topics outside of just discussing AO.
It's important to note that even though I'm making the announcement about this, this is NOT an officially-supported Funcom chat bot. This is run by a third party and is not supported by the company in any fashion. We do not control this bot, its chatter, or what you may stumble across inside of it. We are not in control, so do not expect official support regarding said bot from ARK volunteers, Funcom GMs, or AO developers (there's three more acronyms for ya).
I'll leave this thread up and stickied for the next few days just to make sure everyone gets a chance to see it. Meanwhile, Iriche will be keeping tabs in here so if there are any feature requests you guys would like to see be sure to pop in and suggest stuff - Right now its just a bare-bones chat bot, nothing fancy added to it, so feel free to make any suggestions you might have.
Hope to see you inside the channel! =)