It is necessary to disable the unicode art banner in some cases--particularly when running the patchbot in a Docker container on windows, which has problems with certain characters. See for example http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20322 where this problem came up in the case of sage's startup banner. However, the patchbot's banner has the exact same issue. So it would be good for now to have an option to disable it.
It is necessary to disable the unicode art banner in some cases--particularly when running the patchbot in a Docker container on windows, which has problems with certain characters. See for example http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20322 where this problem came up in the case of sage's startup banner. However, the patchbot's banner has the exact same issue. So it would be good for now to have an option to disable it.