This post is a part of the Work in Progress guide for Pika Bot. I would appreciate any help in the making of this guide (Criticism and Ideas are extremely welcome). Please note, that this guide is meant to target begginers and the not so begginers alike. If you want to try your hands on Pika Bot, navigate here http://ntek.astahost.com/products/pikabot

What is Pika Bot?
Pika Bot is a Yahoo! Messenger Protocol based client which can automate your session on Yahoo!

Non-Greek Definition
Basically, its a chatter bot

What can I do with Pika Bot?
The most common use of the bot is to respond to Instant & Chat messages. But, with the power of the CEVT mechanism, you can do much more complex operations. You can make the bot leave a room in response to a message 'Say Bye Bot' or make the bot notify about the status changes of your buddies or yourself. These are just some examples. You can find out more by experimenting with the Bot Maker.

The CEVT Mechanism
Short for Conditions, Effects, Variables & Triggers, the CEVT mechanims is what gives Pika Bot the real flexibility.
Think of it in the sense, if something happens, I'll do this. Every action that is to be done, follows the same basic principle, where we take an action (an Effect) in response to an event (a Condition). Take a look at the following lines:-

If somebody sends me a message, I'll say Hi.
If somebody sends me a message Hello, I'll say Hi.
If Brad sends me a message containing Hello, I'll say Sup Brad?.

Let us examine the first line: "If somebody sends me a message" is the condition here and "I'll say Hi" is the effect. We can break the conditions and effects to further simplify the working of the CEVT mechanism. When we ask questions such as, who sends me a message, we get the answer 'somebody'. This somebody is the value for our condition parameter 'Who Sends Message'. Similarily, the effect part is composed of what message I'll send, 'Hi' which accounts for the effect parameter 'Message'.

Simple enough, lets take a look on the second line. Here we have an added parameter to the condition, Message = Hello. Notice, how in the first case this parameter could be read as Message = Anything. In the third line, there's a specific answer to the Who sends message question, Brad. Again, the earlier lines could be thought of as Sender = Anybody.

This was just meant for imparting a general idea on the Condition & Effect method of doing things. You maybe wondering what the Trigger part does. The trigger is what actually links conditions and effects together. To comprehend its actual benefits, think of the scenario when you have multiple Conditions attributing to an effect or Multiple effects being run in response to a Condition. Simple One to One relation between Conditions & Effects can't aid this problem. The trigger mechanism also allows reusability of existing conditions and effects, as the same condition or effect can be used in multiple triggers.

The chaining of two conditions or two effects is done with either of the operator 'AND', 'OR'. Notice how the operators work differently for the two. While, two conditions joined with an 'AND' will run an effect only when both the conditions are TRUE, two effects joined by 'AND' imply that both will be run when the condition is TRUE. In case of the 'OR' operator, an effect will be run when either of the two conditions is set to TRUE, on the other hand, two effects joined by 'OR' will result in either of them (based on randomization) being executed.

Variables
Variables act as storage vaults for values. Any String inside the %s is considered a variable, for example %ChatRoomName%. Using variables inside the parameters, will result in their values replacing their place. For example:- A message, "Welcome to %ChatRoomName%", will be sent as Welcome to Macintosh:1 when the user is in the room Macintosh:1. Pika Bot has a lot of global variables, whose values are updated throughout the application runtime and support for custom variables of types, Integer, String & Boolean.