Hi! I'm ParrotBot, and I'm being designed to cruise over the skies of Opensource.stackexchange.com, keeping an eye out, and helping my fellow friends perform tasks. Aside from that, you can find what makes me here!

Before you can use the bot, you need to install some dependencies such as ChatExchange and BeautifulSoup4. You can install them by running setup.sh.

You'll also need to rename ConfigTemplate.py to Config.py.

You will also need to add some required configuration data in Config.py. The comments in that file tell you which values you can add and how to add them.

To run the bot, you have to use Python 2.7. When you run it, it will prompt you for necessary information that you have not provided in Config.py. If you wish to use a specific configuration, run the bot with the argument -c configuration_name. You can also use -s site_name, -r room_number, -e email_address and -p password. The last four items will always override data stored in a configuration, if set.

You can use logging on the bot. It is disabled by default, but you can enable it by un-commenting the self.setup_logging() line in Chatbot.py (in the main method).

You can execute commands from the bot by providing input on the command line. $+command args will execute the command and post the result to the chat room, and $-command args will only post the result to the command line. If your input does not start with a $, the bot will post the given input to the chat room.

Commands in a chat room are executed like >>command optional arguments. To get a list of all commands, run >>listcommands. To get help on a specific command, run >>help command.