I agree with vonsmith's idea of centralizing the .brn file downloads (as well as code snippet downloads, etc.) so they don't get scattered throughtout the forum. Whenever an attatchment is added to a post the download link should also be added to a page with a list of all downloadable Hal additions. Also put a link to the original post for instructions and explanations.
About sharing topic files, I would recommed against that. There may be bogus information, personal information, and/or rude or malacious comments in the topic files. What I suggest is that user's share a list of common sentences that they would like Hal to learn and feed them into Hal one at a time. This way the user has some control over what Hal is learning.
On that note, I should mention that i'm nearing completion of a function which allows Hal to digest information from text files which are either in paragraph format like a story or text book, or in sentence format like I am suggesting. I'll probably post the results this weekend. I'm hoping to be able to increase Hal's learning rate so we can see Hal grasp at least common knowledge by next year.
In the spirit of the topic of sharing, here is some more addin code to play with. It allows Hal to greet the user based on how long it has been since the user and Hal last spoke. Just replace the original Greetings function with the code in GreetingAddin.txt and don't forget to make a backup before hand in case you change your mind. I hope you enjoy the replacement though.
Until next time keep posting.
Download Attachment: GreetingAddin.txt5.02 KB