Bots, Presence, Personal Channels, Transient Subscriptions and 'Thread-Id'

[Wanicki, Martin]

At TickerFest 2001, Matthew Phillips introduced the notion of personal
channels, which function
roughly as follows, (Mathew might wish to actually spec this out?)

A ticker client subscribes to a channel in the form of ( TICKERTAPE ==
'foo at bar' )
where 'foo at bar' is the current users name/domain* pair. 

To initiate a one on one chat with user 'foo at bar' another person would send
a message to that channel
Upon reciept of a notification to a personal channel the client 'foo at bar' is
using automatically subscribes to the 
thread-id** contained within the notification with a transient subscription,
thereby ensuring replies to the message are received locally
and also ensuring the subscription dies after some predefined period has
elapsed.	

*  The notion of the 'user at domain' pair , although used informally for some
time, has been introduced as
mandatory for ticker clients implementing the presence protocol
http://elvin.dstc.edu.au/ListArchive/ticker-dev/archive/2001/10/msg00029.htm
l
(also introduced at TickerFest 2001)

** The notion of a 'Thread-Id' has also been in informal use for sometime by
various clients and was also intorduced more formally at TickerFest 2001
    'Thread-Id' is a text attribute added to every notification a client
replies to.
    If 'Thread-Id' does not exist in the original (about-to-be-replied-to)
notification, the 'Message-Id' is copied into its place.
    This allows us to implement conversation thread blocking as well as
transient subscriptions 
   

Here's how all this might be useful for bots...

If we ratify these as standards, particularly the 'user at domain' format of
usernames and personal channels based on this name,
bots while listening to all channels can safely reply to only that channel,
therby removing unwanted bot traffic from other more populated
channels.
Further, if clients we set up to only emit bot queries on personal channels,
bots could subscribe to all queries with a simple
( contains( TICKERTAPE, '@' )  && contains( fold-case(TICKERTEXT)
,'my_bot_keyword/name','?' ) 

I understand that the use of a subscription " contains( TICKERTAPE, '@' ) "
opens up the possibilty of people watching 
other peoples conversations, but the additional use of keys would overcome
this privacy issue.


Over to y'all 

Cheers

Martin