As well as wasting time on Usenet, some of the inhabitants of alt.alumni.warwick like to waste it on IRC, too. They do it in #warwick on the Astrolink network. Here's how you can do the same:
Bisc and ChanServ are two bots who inhabit the channel. They're not real people, just computer programs.
ChanServ is run by the Astrolink network, and maintains the registration of the channel.
Bisc is an infobot, is run by us, and has the task of entertaining us with his meagre artificial intelligence. He can even play Mornington Crescent.
Most of Bisc's capabilities are documented in the infobot guide, but Bisc can do a few extra things. In no particular order:
wsc | filmsoc
Say what's on at Warwick Student Cinema.
weather
Give the current weather in Coventry.
what's on the wall?
wall?
Shows what's been stuck to the wall. People put things on the wall if they dislike them, or simply want to draw attention to them.
nail | glue foo [
to the wall ]
/me nails | glues
foo [ to the wall ]
Add an item to the wall. There can be at most 10 items on the wall at once, after which one of the last five will be covered up at random. No item can be on the wall twice.
convert | convert units | units quantity unit to unit
Performs unit conversions. Understands prefixes and more units that you knew existed. Uses GNU units for the back-end. Be aware that many units default to their US versions, so you'll need to use, say, brgallon instead of gallon.
timer time message
Have bisc say message after time seconds.
haiku seed string
Have bisc utter a haiku allegedly based upon your input. This is made possible by Coy.
lovetest name1 & name2
Find out what these people think of each other. We used to use Dr Vince's Test of Lurve to find this out, but now we use The Love Calculator instead. They even have source code available.
Unfortunately, abuse, blurfl, and pom no-longer function. Their work was done by external commands, belonging to Newwords, which we don't have access to any more.