Linkbot is a ruby chatbot designed to sit in your chat room and provide interesting/fun/useful responses to your queries. It has an easy-to-use plugin system and many plugins already written.
Make sure you have ruby 1.9 or greater, rubygems, and bundler installed.
Then,
git clone https://github.com/markolson/linkbot.git
cd linkbot
bundle install
That should set you up with linkbot and all its dependencies.
Next, copy config.json.example into config.json, and set the
appropriate variables. You must fill in the connectors field
with appropriate connection information, but feel free to delete
sections from teh plugins section for plugins you don't want.
(TODO: more on this, refactor config)
Finally, run ruby linkbot.rb to run linkbot.
Connectors are the interface for linkbot to connect with your chat service. Currently, linkbot has jabber and campfire connectors.
The service is mainly used on hipchat at the moment, so bug reports and patches from other services would be very helpful.
Plugins are the bits that make linkbot useful. Each plugin implements a command that linkbot knows how to respond to.