About Eggdrop Last revised: July 27, 2010

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
  of Eggdrop 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 1.9 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. The Eggdrop tarball is about 5.4 MB
        unpacked.
    -   Tcl -- Eggdrop cannot compile without Tcl installed on your
        shell.

  Copyright (C) 1999 - 2025 Eggheads Development Team
