Robot

From BotHouse MediaWiki

The term Bot refers to an abbreviation of the word Robot. Robots are designed to use the idea of automation to complete tasks as a human normally would.

Though robots come in many forms it is beyond the scope of this page to explain them all but only to discuss how robots pertain to IRC.

IRC robots designed for channel maintenance became very popular in the early 1990s. As human users only connected to IRC for a period of time before disconnecting, this left channels at a great disadvantage when operators were not around to manage users inside.

IRC robots were initially designed to make channel maintenance easier by incorporating mechanisms to manage flooding, operators, ban lists, etc. In a robot managing channel maintenance, it allows for users to request operations from the robot and not have another human on the other side to carry out the action. This made it very easy for people to disconnect from IRC with the confidence that there would always be a way to gain channel operator status to manage channel users.

Some robots have been designed not to help maintain channels, rather to facilitate entertainment by providing games and other features such as:

• Trivia
• Acronym games
• Hangman
• Fetching news feeds from websites for channel display
• Internet tools such as WHOIS, DIG, NSLOOKUP, etc.

Other IRC robots have been written with malicious intent to initiate attacks on web services and/or people. These types of bots generally are not known to the computer's owner/operator as they would knowingly be engaging in illegal activities. Many of these robots are considered viruses as they can be of detriment to the computer's health as well as attempting to spread to other computers and inflicting damage.