== Kepot Group Invite Bot Services ==
The Kepot bots offer a reliable group invite service for secondlife. The main focus of this bot are group invites for rentals and similar service groups, that are not open enrollment.
== History ==
Anabella asked me to help her with optimizing her business in Febuary 2009. To free her from the burden of reading her transaction history several times a day and comparing them to group membership of two groups. A good friend of mine offered a well known group invite bot service at this time. We hired his bots, and connected them with my patches for Hippo rental and intelliAd services.
In June my friend announced that he wanted to shutdown his bot service. We convinced him to give us one month to migrate our application.
I started searching for a possible replacement and evaluted five different bots. Most failed the basic requirement; to check if an avatar is already a member of the group, before inviting. This resulted in two blue popups, the first showing the invite, the second the error message. They also normaly offered only IM to communicate with the bot, and its impossible for a script to know, if an IM arrived and was processed, as an avatar can not reply to an object instant message.
I'm a Unix admin, managing shoutcast servers and clusters for SL. So I decided to take a closer look at libomv source code. Plan B, to host the bots myself took shape. I was suprised how friendly and fun the #libomv-dev chat group is. My bots are running in a productivity envirnment, serving several rental groups with up to 700 members, since mid Juli. And most important: My patches to libomv had been merged.
== Design and Differences ==
Objects communicating with my bot fill a webform. The status 200 should tell them, that the job was inserted to the mySQL database. The object can retry to submit the form later or inform the object owner, if this part of communcation failed.
Every group is served by two bots who join the group. One of those two bots will also advertise your service with his profile picks. This allows the shutdown of one bot for maintenance while the other bot continues to serve requests.
The website does not use javascript or flash, but currently focuses on plain numbers and names, also offering a CSV download for own statistics. Anabella thinks this is better suited for real business since the bot checks, if an avatar joined the group an hour after invitation.
There is no vendor to pay my bots and there likely won't be a vendor to hire my bots in the near future. Kebot is a not a product you can buy out of the box, but a service.
== Prices and Installation ==
I'll come to your parcel and discuss to you how to implement my service with your existing bussiness.
As there is no vendor, you pay me directly at the end of month to hire my bots for the next month. A short IM exchange to confirm to each other that both are fine and business continues as usual is not a requirement, but its nice to stay in contact.
Monthly fee:
L$400/month for one group slot for groups that are not open enrollment.
L$1000/month for a complete bot sitting on your land. This is required, if you want to invite into open enrollment groups also. This bot only invites into your groups, so its your own risk, if the bot receives an AR because someone thinks its SPAM.
Setup fee:
L$400 initial setup fee. Plus tip of customers choice for addional services, e.g. patching rental boxes.
== Contact ==
IM Kephra Nurmi