You proberbly already know what IRC and Eggdrops are and what you can do with them, but to help newbies I
will give some basic information about them before we start creating real scripts.
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. An IRC network is made of multiple servers connected to each
other. On IRC you have channels, how many depends on which network you are. Most networks allow you to create
your own channels so you can be with a group of friends in your own channel, without outsiders. You could
compare IRC with a hotel. You can go visit people in their rooms or get your own room.
You are proberbly using a program like mIRC in Windows,
X-Chat in X11 or BitchX in
Linux to connect to an IRC server, but what exactly does that program do?
These programs send special commands to the IRC server to make sure that what you type arrives at the
correct destination. If you are going to write TCL scripts which have to send information to someone through a
message, notice, ctcp or something else you can not simply do something like notice <nickname> <message>.
You would have to send the specific command to the IRC server just like mIRC, X-Chat and BitchX do, so you will
also need to know a bit about how an IRC server interacts with IRC clients if you want to accomplish your goals.
While you are reading this guide you will learn what the most commenly used commands are and how to use them. They
aren't very difficult so don't worry about that or what they exactly are. If you are familiar with RFC protocols and
understand what they say, you can do a search on RFC1459.txt and read it to learn more about the IRC
protocol. Appendix A also discusses various IRC server
commands.
The word bot comes from robot. Bots are programs which connect to an IRC server and perform commands you tell
them to do. Most bots are very configurable and can be expanded with scripts. The main purpose of bots are to
guard channels. On IRC servers without ChanServ a channel is removed when nobody is on them. When you have a bot
which is permanently online you can put it in the channel to prevent it from being removed.
Bots can also store information about people who are not allowed in the channel and kick/ban them when they
join. This way you don't have to do everything yourself and also have a channel that can't be taken by someone
else just because he/she joined while nobody was around.
Eggdrop is a bot written in C. It is highly configurable and can be easily expandeded with TCL scripts. You
can change almost everything with TCL scripts.
Eggdrop comes with its source. This lets C programmers fix bugs and change anything they want on a more
deeper level aswell and also make modules for it written in C aswell.
Eggdrop keeps a user database in which users are identified by their hostname and a password they set
themselves. You can link mutiple eggdrops together to make them share user databases and send commands to each
other so they perform commands like opping each other. With the right scripts, there is nothing Eggdrop can't
do.
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