[JDEV] Re: Mass communication

[Christopher R. Wren]

I actually went so far as to write a PERL bot that logs in as a user and 
reflects messages to all users that have subbed to the bot's presence and 
are online.  It works pretty well, but needs to be extende to support 
multiple subscription lists.

recently I discovered JabberBot 
(http://www.msg.net/utility/Jabber/JabberBot/) and plan to take a look at 
that as an alternative.

I think it's important for users to be able to manage their own 
subscriptions (ala zephyr instances) and also for server admins to be able 
to create and force subscription to administrative instances.  Does anyone 
know of any tools that allow scriptable access to individual user's 
rosters?  I can muck around by hand in the spool directory, but this is 
error prone.  Would it be better to write a script that mucks around in the 
spool directory, or can I do these kids of things through the server somehow?

Chris