What is a Bot?

[naruto=pwnage]

it would seem that everyone complains they can't find this that or the other. eventually someone will say there is a bot on irc that has it. just what the hell is a bot?! honestly I apologise for my noobness but it would be nice if I was able to understandthis stuff.
peace.

[Carnage]

speaking of bots, does anyone know any good tutorials for setting up bots for people to download files from?

[masamuneehs]

think of bots as the 'NPCs' of IRC channels. Send certain commands to the bots and they respond by making files available to download, respond by kicking/banning a user and stuff like that.

[naruto=pwnage]

great. what's an NPC?

[Deadfire]

*sigh* it appears you can't search google

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. 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 ever take bot code, .ini-files or strange commands from someone and run it without exactly understanding what it does. Blind trust is a common mistake among newbies. If you feel you just have to run a bot, at least learn the programming. At this moment no Windows based bot programs or script handling clients exist.

The most comman one you will run into is the one your talking about (Or trying to anyways) is the fileserver bot. This Bot if given the commands of !list (Shows you the files for download) or @find (Finds a file on the server) will do something for you

[naruto=pwnage]

ah. thanks. :)

[complich8]

speaking of bots, does anyone know any good tutorials for setting up bots for people to download files from?

Depends how serious you are about it ... here's some info

here (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sfromley/fserve/) is a step-by-step walkthrough for sysreset -- a fairly feature-rich and easy to use script set (no longer updated, still usable).

UPP (http://upp.monkey-pirate.com/) is another fairly popular (but also no longer updated) script set that does the same thing.

In general, sysreset and upp are pretty common fileserving scripts for mirc. If you're running a linux box you want to serve from, there are perl scripts for xchat, I am fairly sure there's also perl scripts for irssi, and there's TCLFileServer, all of which will give you a functional interactive fileserver, similar to upp and sysreset.

Lastly, if you're serious about mass distribution (ie: you have a lot of bandwidth), most large channel xdcc bots use iroffer, a standalone xdcc bot application. iroffer can be run on windows, but it's natively a linux application, and generally works better there.

Technically, you could also run mirc with no scripts, and run an fserv off of it, or you could write your own scripts to do it, but ... that's beyond the scope of things that people will write howtos about :p

[Sasori]

This Bot if given the commands of !list (Shows you the files for download) or @find (Finds a file on the server) will do something for you
Since doing such things wil get me banned, is there a page somewhere that says "This is what is available for download etc"? I'm looking for it, but not having the best luck

[Assassin]

Doing it will get you banned on our channel, since we're not a distro channel. But if you go to any sub-groups channel, they almost always have distro bots you can download from.

As for your request of a page, you can join #charger or irc.rizon.net. They have a link in the topic that shows what thier 2 distro bots (charger and custie) contain. You can also join pretty much any groups channel, like i mentioned before, and use the !list and @find commands (just make sure they're allowed, as not all channels allow them), or check thier topic for info on what bots they're running and how to access them.

You can also join us at #gotwoot on irc.gotwoot.net and ask us where to find a certain anime/group, and we'll be happy to help you (most of the time :p)

Edit:

Just make sure that if you use the web-irc link on the front page, you pick a name. Otherwise there'll be hell to pay.