What is a 'Bot'?

Actually, an abbreviation for 'Robot'

A bot is an automated way of doing some process, that is far quicker, and far mor reliably performed that way, because humans make mistakes.

"But... bots are stupid, they don't do what I tell them..."

I have said that myself, lol.

However, the mistake was made by the human who issued the instruction or command. It failed because the person issuing it did not do it properly.

There was exactly the same situation in the days of computing before Windows... those of us old who were around in the days when all computer commands were typed will remember the frustration at getting syntax on a complicated command wrong, and it failing. No cut-and-paste then... it had to be laboriously retyped from scratch.

A bot is really just a computer program... or in extreme cases a complete computer... that does things in an automated way for our benefit.

In the case of a program, the 'biblebot' portion of Christian Command script for mIRC is a small series of instructions written in a language that can be read in an ordinary text editor if you have the patience so to do. It occupies just 80 kilobytes of space, plus a further 14 Mb of space of verse data it can access and then post in three versions of the Bible. Biblebot runs on an ordinary personal computer.

Contrast that with Undernet's channel service bot, X, which is actually a seperate server connected to the undernet, which stands completely alone. On this server is stored all the information about the 20 thousand channels on their network, including data on who is allowed to log in to it from each channel (and at what level they can log in), and who are banned from each channel, for how long, by whom they were banned, and why. This is all disussed in the page about Undernet, and which instructions we are able to give to X are covered in the commands section of this site.

In between the two in both size and complexity, are #Christian's privately owned channel bots logos3 and logos9 which are part of a family of similar bots, these two being owned by liam3. logos3 and logos9 are eggdrops - the name of the program.

Eggies come in several different versions... like different versions of computer operating systems such as OS/2, windows 3, windows95, windows98, windows2000... and eggies run on a professional type of computer with a very stable operating system (unlike windows) called unix.

logos3 and logos9 have a number of modules, some of which are 'turned on' and some which are not. We discuss in the commands section of this site what commands are able to be used in our logos, and by whom.

Mention should also be made of Sistrsara which is the channel's Bible trivia bot, and WingBot and isaiah40 which are stand-bys for logos should liam's server be down, or there be another problem with logos. These three bots are pc-based and rely on their owners to be on-line for the bots to be available. Brief details are in the general section of the website, and links below will take you to a full description and commands available.

Just remember that if a bot seems to be 'deaf' when you tell it to do something, it could be for a number of reasons... most likely you have either made a mistake in your typing, or the bot thinks that you are not who you tell it you are... the latter is a very necessary safety feature to protect the integrity of the channel against take-overs by nasty people - who really do exist.

So in a nutshell, thats about all you need to know about bots :)