chatbot using twisted and wokkel

Question

I am writing a chatbot using Twisted and wokkel and everything seems to be working except that bot periodically logs off. To temporarily fix that I set presence to available on every connection initialized. Does anyone know how to prevent going offline? (I assume if i keep sending available presence every minute or so bot wont go offline but that just seems too wasteful.) Suggestions anyone? Here is the presence code:

class BotPresenceClientProtocol(PresenceClientProtocol):

    def connectionInitialized(self):
        PresenceClientProtocol.connectionInitialized(self)
        self.available(statuses={None: 'Here'})

    def subscribeReceived(self, entity):
        self.subscribed(entity)
        self.available(statuses={None: 'Here'})

    def unsubscribeReceived(self, entity):
        self.unsubscribed(entity)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you're using XMPP, as I assume is the case given your mention of wokkel, then, per RFC 3921, the applicable standard, you do need periodic exchanges of presence information (indeed, that's a substantial overhead of XMPP, and solutions to it are being researched, but that's the state of the art as of now). Essentially, given the high likelihood that total silence from a client may be due to that client just going away, periodic "reassurance" of the kind "I'm still here" appears to be a must (I'm not sure what direction those research efforts are taking to ameliorate this situation -- maybe the client could commit to "being there for at least the next 15 minutes", but given that most clients are about a fickle human user who can't be stopped from changing their mind at any time and going away, I'm not sure that would be solid enough to be useful).