I spoke with jcwren, and he indicated that the Robomonks demo is indeed down and is not likely to be restarted.

However, he was open to the idea of someone with a perlmonk.org account running a Robomonk instance there, and having it connect to the perlmonk.org IRC server.

++ for the thought, but I'm concerned that it might be a *LOT* of chatter not directly sent to me... OTOH, i'm not sure which info would be available to us. If we could get a working userlist... it could be very nice. <:)

Well, there is a lot of chatter, just like you (and the box's name) would suggest, but it's not massive volume... You would simply need to treat it as an IRC channel (ie ignore most of what most of the people say most of the time) and then have PM's PMs come to you as IRC PM's, say.

It'd work better with some clients than others. Bitlbee for example woluld work well for some, who watch their clients all the time, but poorly for me, who only has ICQ on there, and only with 5 people online - due to the chatter eating all the `to me' chat

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;

gaim can do irc. bitlbee is based on irc. so why wrap gaim around irc around bitlbee around irc?

--
"WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN"
-- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"

You've mistaken me.

Gaim has an IRC client,a Yahoo client etc with some Tk Widgets for the meatware to interact with, Bitlbee however provides an irc daemon for the user to interact with, via their favourite IRC client, and uses Gaim's client libraries to go off and connect to other chat networks for you.

(for those who have no idea what i'm taking about Bitlbee is an IRC server that connects to icq/msn/yahoo as a client

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;