Security Research

"As a child, it seems completely reasonable to build a spaceship out of bed sheets, firecrackers, and lawn furniture; as you get older, you realize that the S.S. Improbable will not take you to space, but instead a lonely killing field of fire, Child Protective Services, and awkward local news interviews, not necessarily in that order, but with everything showing up eventually.
Security research is the continual process of discovering that your spaceship is a deathtrap."
--James Mickens. (Italics mine)

Ghostly Horde of IRC

This is an idea I came up with a few years ago, but there is no way I am going to have to time to ever implement it. Maybe some one else will run with it...

Back in the Day (Which I am informally defining as the late 1990's) I spent a lot of time on IRC. DALnet was my hangout of choice, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time socializing.
Predictably, I spent time on #science_fiction!
I am by nature a hoarder, and this mania extends to logfiles. Looking through my archives the other day, I found several hundred kilobytes of  channel logs for #nightspell and #vampyreinn.
Here was conversations with people long forgotten about, all have whom have aged, matured and changed over the last 15-20 years. Some have even died.
Most of the chatter is just that, chatter. But #Vampyreinn is a little different. It was billed as a freeform roleplay channel...so most everyone in it liked RPG's of one sort or another. In another context and a decade or so later, cosplaying might have been a really popular hit with us...but all we had was 16 shades of colored text, imagination, and download speeds low enough that even transferring the channel master list was a sit-and-wait operation.
/list, anyone?

Enough history. I have thousands of lines of dialogue and interaction as several dozen characters walked in and out of the eponymous bar, quarreled, boasted, lounged and fought with each other. Storys, events, and dramas. Demonic kings lounging on thrones, lone gunslingers brooding in the leather dusters, alien anthropologists hitting on earth girls, a queen of hell restlessly folding her blue wings.

What I would like is a horde of bots, each primed with its script from long ago. Text color set to dark gray, probably, and maybe a leading underscore on the nicks to prevent collisions with the living & active.
Romantically, the ghostly horde should log in at midnight; more practically perhaps to set the conversations to the twenty year anniversary of the original conversation.
They would not engage anyone else, merely act there roles, and then depart the stage again.
The unenlightened would be baffled at the grey ghosts...but those still on DALnet who remember the old lost friends, would be reminded of them.
My ideal prank. Baffles the unenlightened, and romanticly tweaks the hearts of the few, and sadly now, the old.

Of course, the logs would be undated, and on the next anniversary even more ghosts would crowd on the stage, with ghosts responding the ghosts, and younger ghosts trying to provoke reactions threaded through the real users trying to comprehend....and iterated again, and again, a rolling snowball of text, in time a notorious ghost channel rolling around the calender.