#botb is a very important part to this community, and even somewhere in the Lyceum it says that you really need to be in #botb (at least once in a while, anyway) to be a part of the community.

However, battleofthebits.com isn't too involved with the IRC channel as I think it should be. This "half assed 2 way communication" (as described by Strobe) might need to be rewritten at some point in the future, allowing the BotB bot to be more flexible and involved with botb.org (maybe we should rename the BotB bot so that we don't confuse each other in the future, eh?).

There are a few things that'd be pretty neat to see done here on battleofthebits.com:
• Be able to configure what your IRC nicks (yes, like your main nick, alternate nick, etc.) in the settings.
• Be able to upload your picture for !pix using this information.
• Have the bot log the idle time, active time, and amount of messages sent by each BotBr in the chat room for miscellaneous purposes (such as Chip Champion's "false idol" item suggestion).
• Irkist points, maybe?
• Have the "IRC Bot Announcer" bark on the Home Bunk stripped of unnecessary messages, like the output from !user and !pix.
• I don't know what else, but there's a lot of cool stuff we could do!

I've already told Barron/puke7 about this on #botb, but I may as well post it here.

Yes, #botb is an important part of our community. But joining IRC is only really necessary to participate in OHBs. Now that the site has forums BotBrs can help navigate development here instead of there. And doing it here is much more helpful for me. People always chat about ideas, and I have my opinions, but after that moment it's lost in my dusty memory banks. The whole reason I created this particular forum was to help with that.

It needs to be understood that BotB started as a local, grassroots, meatspace-only event. The website popped up after two years of that and the IRC channel another year beyond that. BotB still tries to hold these local events semiannually (which would look pitiful w/o BotB's international community) and we can't expect a local musician to be that net savvy.

Those are all good ideas. BotBrs with registered nicks should be able to assign them to their own account and many of the other things you said (they could be attached to their OHB entries). Unfortunately, I don't find these ideas a priority over others that are site centric.