What is a Bot?
Bots are programs which perform certain actions when invoked. They are invoked when user texts the keyword they assigned to the bot. Bot typically generates a response back to the user. For example, the weather bot sends back the weather details to the user when they text the area they are interested in.
A “bot” is short for “robot”. It is normally a script run from a client or a separate program (in perl, C, and sometimes more obscure languages). Bots are normally not needed on IRC. A bot generally tries to “protect” a channel from takeovers. It is important to know that many IRC servers (especially in the USA) ban ALL bots. Some IRCOps ban domains if you run a bot on their server (See the segment on K: lines). On IRC you will find a lot of people with a love/hate attitude towards bots. Some bots do good work as file- or info-servers. Some will even entertain you with funny or brain teasing games. These bots can be useful and desireable. Contrary to these bots, you will find lots and lots of bots performing useless ‘carekeeping’ of channels, harassing and boring people and sometimes created with the sole purpose to produce garbage. You can imagine that these bots are disliked by the IRC community. In this context it is good to advise you to -never- -never- ever take bot code, .ini-fil
