Fortunately on the Undernet, timestamping prevents this from happening (see the Undernet FAQ 2 for more info).
What these bots are designed to do is join a channel and try and force a netsplit to get ops or flood out all of the users on the channel. There are a lot of malicious people out there that have created bots that "take over" channels. So running a bot does not mean you can get ops on a channel that you don't presently have ops on. No, bots are just users they can only do what you have access to. Bots can also be great information tools such as Helpbot (which sends out help documents like this).ĭoes this mean bots can do more than I can? Most people use bots to aid in controlling a channel by managing the distribution of ops through an oplist. There are various opinions on what bots are good for. However, you can be the bot if you wish by simply loading the bot script into your chatting client rather than another copy of it. That is how a bot works: you tell it to do particular things on the occurrence of particular events.īots are normally separate processes from your normal client. What this does is tell you who the person is when they join a channel. A simple one that people might use in an ircII client is: Normally a bot contains scripts of "on" commands that react to particular events on IRC. Hopefully this will be clear as we continue. Bots are clients that have automated responses to certain commands (they are just a bunch of scripts).
This is one of the most common questions that appears on channels or newsgroups dealing with IRC. Check out the Documents Project website for more info on all of this, or on IRC, check out some of the help services on #userguide. The second step is to read an IRC primer of some sort. If you are not sure, pick up your favorite guide to the Internet. The most important thing is to know what IRC is. Originally by Super, last revised by loki