Bots are clients that have automated responses to certain commands (they are
just a bunch of scripts). Normally a bot contains scripts of "on" commands that react
to particular events on IRC. A simple one that people might use in an ircII client is:

                                               on join * /whois $0

       What this does is tell you who the person is when they join a channel. That is how
a bot works: you tell it to do particular things on the occurrence of particular events.
Bots are normally separate processes from your normal client. However, you can be
the bot if you wish by simply loading the bot script into your chatting client rather than
another copy of it.

          There are various opinions on what bots are good for. Most people use bots to
aid in controlling a channel by managing the distribution of ops through an oplist. Bots
can also be great information tools such as Helpbot (which sends out help documents
like this).
 

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