By now you’ve probably noticed the bot accounts I created to automatically post content from the RSS feeds of some of the more popular blogs in the SEM/SEO industry. The original purpose for the bots was to help me work out the kinks in the new automatic RSS feed submission feature but I left them enabled after the feature development was complete because I felt they added value by providing more content for the community to read and vote for. Since I enabled them, I’ve been batting around several ideas of what to do with them because I feel they need to be removed from the general queue of user submitted stories. So many submissions come through the bots (even though there are only 4 of them) that user submitted stories tend to get buried in the queue faster than they should be and therefore don’t get the attention they deserve.

Soon I’ll be implementing whatever change we agree on as a community. I don’t want to make the decision myself; I want to hear your thoughts and ideas. I think if done correctly, the bots can add real value to PlugIM, perhaps by narrowing down the number of sites you need to visit during your daily routine. By adding some sort of aggregator section to PlugIM, not only can you read up on what users are finding and sharing, you can also read up on what you’re favorite blogs around the web have been posting. If handled correctly, hopefully we can add many more feeds to the aggregator based on your suggestions.

I invite you all to read Jason Murphy’s excellent article on bots and their place in a community and then ask that you add your thoughts and ideas in the comments section of either this blog post or Jason’s article. Help mold PlugIM into what you want it to become.