the story goes something like this
- something awful creates a new forum for programmers "the cavern of cobol"
- a new irc channel pops up almost by default
- everyone starts writing their own bots, and i cannot resist the temptation
- someone suggests "make a bot that says butt", and everything spirals from there
at first, it just said "butt".
i used some old irc client code i wrote as a teenager, and hack it up to make the proof of concept. it turns out, just saying "butt" is not funny. the next step felt rather obvious, i would replace words with butt, almost echolalia.
that turned out to be kinda funny, but the bot didn't really have a good sense of timing. the real trick? i used the knuth-liang hyphenation algorithm to split words into syllables, and replace them with "butt". it was 90% funnier immediately.
it turns out that it's funnier to replace syllables in longer words with "butt", and it's funnier to pick words closer to the end of the sentence to replace with the word "butt". user testing seemed to prove me right. i didn't stop there.
the next trick? if the word is the same after uppercase, replace it with "BUTT", if the word is the same after uppercasing the first letter, replace it with "Butt", otherwise, "butt". which lead to the absolute joy of seeing "1-800-BUTT". genius.
if you're curious you can look at the very old code on github
other people contributed too: a list of stop words, a tcl port for eggdrops, several attempts to finetuning the probabilities, and perhaps most importantly, code that replaced "fuuuuuck" with "buuuuutt", which is such a good idea i'm a little mad i didn't come up with it.
it wasn't just code contributions: even kcgreen (of dickbutt fame) even drew me a little logo for the little butt guy. i didn't realise it at the time, but my little perl script had been invited to channels across the irc network, and it was way more popular than i thought.
that's about where my part of the story ends. someone else wrote a whole new butt engine in python, and offered to run the bot. i eventually drifted away from IRC and SA, and that was the last i saw of buttbot. that's how things stood for about fifteen years.
then i started watching twitch. i almost did a double take the first time i saw a buttbot in chat. i asked myself, "is this my buttbot? what the hell?" and eventually found the answers. it wasn't my code. it wasn't even the python replacement.
someone had written a whole new buttbot, based on my old code, my old algorithms, along with all the improvements people had come up with. my butt of thesius was still alive, still chugging along, still going "1-800-BUTT"
a friend had said "buttbot is probably the most important piece of code you'll ever write" and i laughed it off, but almost two decades later, he was right. i've never had fanart for code before, and honestly i'm not sure if it'll ever happen again.
the story doesn't quite end there.
twitch have changed how bots interact with the service, and "buttsbot", the current incantation, needs substantial changes to make it work. buttbot is dead, once again.
i have no doubts buttbot will return. the people love butts.
