So last night, while doing nothing, I decided to full around with eggdrop irc bots. I specifically used Windrop to run on my desktop for easy testing and whatnot, but one day I hope to toss this thing on a nix shell and get it off a personal pc.

The config file was daunting. This wasn’t the first time I made one of these bots, but since I had originally, the config base file has been altered somewhat, and is far more complex. After I partly configured it, there was the problems of commenting out all the kill commands that were put in it to make sure you went through the entire file thoroughly. Needless to say, I didn’t, and probably wasted more time looking for those damn lines then it would have taken to just read the entire thing. Then there was the problem that the bot worked, but it would flip out when opped and do crazy things to the channel and people. I couldn’t fix this without reinstalling the bot, and the torment continued.

After maybe seven re-edits, the thing became stable enough to op, and utilized some key features. TCL scripts add so much functionality to these bots I wonder why anyone would use them for anything else. I mean, I can see these bots back in the day used in place for various services, but now, they are just kinda knick-knacks. TCL scripts allow regular programmers to go off and create bot code without modifying any key files. These scripts are add-ons, or modules if you will.

So now, I have all these scripts on the bot. Weather, horoscopes, seen commands, etc. It all functions well, six hours after starting. The possibly best feature I integrated into this bot is the ability to read RSS. I now have a use for these feeds I have been compiling. The beauty is, the bot will check the forums, and the rest of the site every half an hour, If something in the feed is new, the bot will announce it to the channel. Refreshing the pages waiting to see updates becomes obsolete.