Eggdrop is the most advanced, most popular, and best supported IRC bot. If you’ve never used a bot before, you’ll find Eggdrop provides a staggering array of options for channel management, and can easily be expanded further to provide even more functions. The Eggdrop code is free for anyone to download and use. Some of the main features of Eggdrop include:

– Support for multiple channels.

– An advanced, flexible userfile structure.

– The ‘party line’, a unique feature accessed by DCC chat which allows you to speak to others connected to the bot’s party line, and is also used as a console where you can control and use most of Eggdrop’s features.

– Botnet support, allowing you to link multiple bots to create a ‘botnet’ and synchronise userfiles with automatic userfile sharing.

– Multi-language support, with English, German and French included.

– Support for Tcl scripts and modules, allowing you to easily add extra features to the bot.

An IRC bot is a program that sits in an IRC channel around the clock, keeping it open 24 hours a day. It looks just like a normal user on the channel, but is usually idle until it’s called upon to perform a particular function. A bot can contribute greatly to the stability of a channel by protecting it from takeovers and abusers, and providing a central location for storage of the channel op list and giving ops to those users when they join the channel. It can also perform many other useful functions, such as logging channel events, providing frequently-requested information, hosting trivia games, and so on. IRC bots are particularly important on IRC networks.