| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
Usually, an IRC bot is deployed as a detached program running from a stable host. It sits on an IRC channel to keep it open and prevents malicious users from taking over the channel. Due to the nature of the IRC protocol, the bot appears to be a normal user. It can be configured to give channel operator status to privileged users when they join the channel, and can provide a unified channel operator list.
Most of these features, of course, require that the bot itself is a channel operator. Thus, most IRC bots are run from computers which have long uptimes (generally running a BSD derivative or Linux) and a fast, stable Internet connection. As Internet Relay Chat has become popular with many dial-up users as well, special services have appeared that offer limited user-level access to a stable Linux server with a decent connection. The user may run an IRC bot from this shell account. These services are commonly known as shell providers.
It can also perform many other useful functions, such as logging what happens in an IRC channel, giving out information on demand (very popular in IRC channels dealing with user support), creating statistics, hosting trivia games, and so on. These functions are usually provided by user-writable scripts, often written in a scripting programming language such as TCL and Perl, which can be added to the bot in question.
IRC bots are particularly well-used on IRC networks without channel registration services like ChanServ, such as EFnet and IRCnet, and on networks that may prevent your channel being registered due to certain registration requirements (minimum user count, etc.), such as Undernet or QuakeNetQuakeNet is the largest IRC network in the world, with its average number of users well over 150,000. It has been part of the Big Four (the group of four largest IRC networks) since 2002. At its peak on 17th November 2003, the network recorded 218,709 sim.
Popular IRC bots include EggdropEggdrop is a popular IRC bot. It was originally written in the December of 1993 by a certain Robey Pointer to watch a single channel. It is written in the C programming language, and features an interface for scripts that allow the user to enhance the fun, EnergyMech, Infobot, blootbot , and Supybot.