I have used these other wildcards on a bot, using, for example, the question Are you Male or Female? Please enter M or F.
Then I would use something like
ON *:TEXT:?:?:{
if $istok(M F,$1,32) {
set $+(%,gender,$nick) $1
}
}
In this way, if they enter more than a single character, the matchtext section of the ON TEXT event will not match.
Similarily I could use
ON *:TEXT:&:?:{
if $istok(M Male F Female,$1,32) {
set $+(%,gender,$nick) $1
}
}
allowing for the single character M or F, as well as the full word Male or Female.
Note that the last ? in each of the ON TEXT events I've shown is to restrict the responses to PM/query only.