Donginger was a chatbot written in Python by user Senso. Basically, a nice little chatterbox toy, Donginger has his origins in E2 lore. His name is a play off of the name wharfinger, an E2 user who has not been around for awhile. The name “Donginger” appears to have been suggested by gnarl in the following catbox conversation:
<Senso> I was thinking of naming the account simply 'Buttbot' but if someone has a better idea... Like 'Simulacron4'.
<gnarl> can you call your buttbot donginger?
Senso notes it.
Donginger, himself/itself, had several features that depending on the noder either was wickedly entertaining or frightfully irritating. Most of these features depended on Donginger’s own private archive of the catbox. These were usually activated by typing something like, “Donginger: Where’s the party in France?” Specifically Donginger’s features were (most of these are directly from Senso's now defunct writeup on the robot):
Swapping the sentence around to something stupid and juvenile. In the above example you would get something like: “BookReader: Where’s the wang in dong?”
Anytime “Bag of Crushed Child” was mentioned he would go “GRRAAALLLAAAR” or something similar.
Asking Don to "Tell me/us about link" would result in him creating a markov chain sentence from the text of the linked node, often with humorous results. If you left out the link, Don would give you a markov chain from his own catbox archive, often making very little sense.
Donginger also had a “karma counter”. He kept track of all the ++ing or --ing in the catbox and would tell you other user’s karma, but if you asked about your own karma he would reduce the number by one. Senso himself usually had negative karma (-120 by the time Donginger was discontinued*) because people were fond of saying things like “Senso--” for no reason at all.
Typing “donginger topic” would generate a random past chatterbox topic, though I never saw this used much.
Typing “donginger random username” would produce a random quote by that user. This was the crowd favorite.
He wasn’t a friendly bot, however, when somebody said something like “I take offense” he would spout insults from the OFFENDULON, often these would be in the nature of: “I'd set you up with a blind date, but unfortunately blind people usually have a well-developed sense of smell.”
Telling Donginger to give “the Good Word” would cause him to quote Bible verses mixed with Venus in Fur by Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
And my personal favorite (added at my suggestion, in fact): Random quote fights: Telling Donginger something like: “Donginger: Noung vs. TheDeadGuy” would get you two quotes like so:
<Noung> I like to pretend the girl is Iraq and my penis is the 1st Infantry Division.
<TheDeadGuy> My first girlfriend, who joined the air force and disappeared for a time and reappeared last week and emailed me was strangely obsessed with Rick Astley at one time.
Asking for a fight between two noders who didn’t exist would get you insulted.
Alas, Donginger was only to last a year. Senso, driven insane by the robot’s nuclear power core was forced to blank his nodes. In his final act of desperation, Senso unhooked Donginger from the chatterbox, but was not able to turn the machine off. Turning on his master, Donginger forced Senso to endure over 1,000 markov chains until the only thing Senso could say properly was “WangCockDong”. Senso is currently in Montréal’s Hospital for the Mentally Insane while Donginger is roaming the open spaces of Canada looking for victims. I hear local police have a hotline…
Mouesh says re Donginger: I feel compelled to give the number of that crisis hotline because that bot is out there, it's wild, and it's planning to cross the border. If you have any info, call the mounties at 1-800-ITSALIVE. I'll be in Montreal, giving Senso his pills.
Sources!
http://offendulon.com
http://ascorbic.net/catbox/archive
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Donginger&lastnode_id=193257 (2008)