...I hope this hasn't been mentioned aforehand, but one of my friends introduced me to a site for setting up your own bots for AIM, and I've been working with it lately. It is based upon AIML, ALICE and all that. Although there are some differences, unless I'm mistaken a good deal of the files in the database contributed by their members can be logicaly used on message boards, and should be compatible. However, I'm not sure as I'm still in the beginning stages of studying this, so if anyone would like to check it out, it's at
http://www.runabot.com/
I hope this may be of some help to something.
This is my signature.