Orthographical Permutation Wave RobotThis Wave robot creates random realistic typos in messages sent by certain participants in a wave. It's good for poking fun at people who are notoriously bad spellers.

Why the odd name?It's simple, really. If you create a robot called "typobot", then everyone will know exactly what it does. But if you create an "orthopermubot", what does that do? Sounds perfectly harmless to me. (Also, typobot was already taken. :) )

How does it work?At present, a random number of typos, based on the word's length, will be applied to words at least three characters long. The types of permutation currently supported are:

delete a random character from a word transpose two adjacent characters within a word repeat a character in a word insert a character close on the QWERTY keyboard to another recently typed character change a character with one that is close on the QWERTY keyboard

How do I change who it affects?You can't change the version that I have deployed out on App Engine -- it is preconfigured to harass only certain friends of mine. However, if you want to download the code and deploy your own version that harasses your own friends, then be my guest! Just change web.xml to contain a newline-separated list of regular expressions and deploy it out as your own App Engine app. For each wavelet that the robot is added to, it will listen for blip submissions from participants whose addresses match at least one of those patterns, and will put lots of typos in those blips.

Future directionsI'm thinking of adding either a configuration web interface, or perhaps a gadget where the behavior can be controlled per wave (i.e. lots of typos vs. just a few, different types of typos, the participants it affects, etc.).

I'm also thinking of adding different weights to the typos, which would control how likely each type of typo is to occur. I might also add some new types of typos like removing words, adding duplicate words, and more realistic fat-fingering typos.