How can I tell if someone on IRC isn a person but is really a bot?
Generally bots are quiet, except for when a) someone makes them do or say something or b) something occurs that make the bot react. An example of this is when someone floods a channel and then is promptly kicked out of the channel and possibly banned as well. You may have seen this happen and thought “Wow! that was a fast kick!” It was probably a bot kick, scripted to automatically protect the channel against flooding. If you see that the same nick is always setting mode +o or kicking people, but you never see this person talking, chances are you have discovered a channel bot. Two other things to look for are the words “bot” or “srv” in the nickname or user name. You can get the username by typing /whois
