The SalatBot is a chat bot application for the streaming platform Twitch.tv running as a firefox plugin and allowing automation of simple moderation and event organization tasks.
Keep reading to learn some basics about chat bots and the speciality of the SalatBot or read the manual to install and configure the SalatBot (This will be done within a few minutes, I promise).
A chat bot is a computer program that reads and writes to a chat room. But instead of showing the messages to the user and waiting for him to type a response, it analyzes incomming messages itself and uses certain filters and patterns to find an appropriate response.
It can be used to detect spam or offensive messages and take actions like timing out or banning its sender or to offer automated answers to certain commands or phrases. Another use case are little chat applications like polls or raffles.
Unfortunatelly such an automated chat participant can also be used to manipulate or spam a chat room. For example it could crawl through the channels of a certain game to spam them with advertisement for a specific channel to gain viewers.
In the chat rooms of twitch streams you can find hundreds and thousands of people typing their comments to the show and discussing lively. Especially for more popular streams a chat bot is a must have to control the chat flow, answer frequently asked questions or to host polls and raffles.
The usual chat bot is running on a certain server in the internet, has to be invited to your chat, being granted moderation permission and can mainly be controlled by the channel owner himself.
The SalatBot on the other hand can be used by everybody. The only thing you need is a Twitch account and the firefox web browser since you are effectively going to become the bot yourself. You will obviously not be able to timeout or ban people without moderation permissions. But there are no restrictions to viewer events, polls or automated answers.
This makes it a valuable tool for chat moderators to interactively control spam waves or take care of the chat commands and events.
Now that you know the basic idea of the SalatBot, you can go ahead and install it into your firefox browsers by just a few clicks. Read the tutorial for further information.
If you would like to take a look into the programming source code, write your own extensions or correct my terrible programming style, you are welcome to read through my code and documentation and comment or contact me personally for whatever reason you would like ;)