Eggdrop Documentation: About Eggdrop

About Eggdrop

Eggdrop was created around December 1993 to help stop the incessant wars on #gayteen. It spawned from another bot that was in the process of being written at the time called "Unrest". The purpose of Unrest was to answer help requests from other bots. The first public release was version 0.6, and since then, it has grown into what you have before you.

Eggdrop is the World's most popular Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot; it is freely distributable under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Eggdrop is a feature rich program designed to be easily used and expanded upon by both novice and advanced IRC users on a variety of hardware and software platforms.

An IRC bot is a program that sits on an IRC channel and performs automated tasks while looking just like a normal user on the channel. Some of these functions include protecting the channel from abuse, allowing privileged users to gain op or voice status, logging channel events, providing information, hosting games, etc.

One of the features that makes Eggdrop stand out from other bots is module and Tcl scripting support. With scripts and modules, you can make the bot perform almost any task you want. They can do anything from preventing floods to greeting users and banning advertisers from channels.

You can also link multiple Eggdrop bots together to form a botnet. This can allow bots to op each other securely, control floods efficiently, and even link channels across multiple IRC networks. It also allows the Eggdrops share user lists, ban lists, exempt/invite lists, and ignore lists with other bots if userfile sharing is enabled. This allows users to have the same access on every bot on your botnet. It also allows the bots to distribute tasks such as opping and banning users. See doc/BOTNET for information on setting up a botnet.

Eggdrop is always being improved and adjusted because there are bugs to be fixed and features to be added (if the users demand them, and they make actually sense). In fact, it existed for several years as v0.7 - v0.9 before finally going 1.0. This version of Eggdrop is part of the 1.6 tree. A valiant effort has been made to chase down and destroy bugs.

To use Eggdrop, you need:

Some sort of Unix account

A pretty good knowledge of IRC and Unix, including how to compile programs, how to read, and what DCC chat is, at absolute minimum.

About 5-7 MB of disk space for installation and up to 15 MB during compilation. The Eggdrop tarball is about 5.8 MB unpacked.

Tcl -- Eggdrop cannot compile without Tcl installed on your shell.

Before starting, ask yourself if you really need a bot. Most IRC servers allow only a handful of bots, and some forbid them outright. The reason? Too many people run bots as "toys" or as a means of destruction. If you want to use Eggdrop for destructive purposes, go ahead and erase this directory now. It's almost impossible to do what you want with this bot.