Winbot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WinBot is an IRC bot for Microsoft Windows platforms, similar in behaviour to the eggdrop IRC bot.
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[edit] A few words about IRC bots
Bots are almost essential on any IRC network that doesn’t have nickname or channel services (NickServ and ChanServ). WinBots will do the job of a ChanServ service, protecting your channel from takeovers, keeping the channel in the channel list when you’re gone, and allowing trusted channel members to gain channel operator status. Without a WinBot, another IRC user can easily take your channel while there are no other people in it. WinBots can also be used to entertain, for example using bar-scripts (one of these is included with WinBot) and IRC-based games. They can also supplement the power offered by chanserv, giving you the ultimate control over your IRC channels.
[edit] Features
- For Windows users, WinBot offers an advantage over eggdrop, in that it can locally, thus eliminating the need for access to a remote unixoid shell account. This also makes it more convenient to use it as a basic IRC client—although this is not what it is primarily designed for. The downside is that, if the machine is a users general workstation, it is likely to require much more frequent reboots, and if it is behind a consumer-grade internet connection, much more frequently than a remote system on a commercial connection. Any failure of the computer or net connection means that the bot leaves IRC.
- WinBot can be left running on its own for days or even weeks on end, minimised on a computer or running as a Windows NT/2000 service process.
- WinBot is designed as a service bot for small IRC networks running Windows irc servers, for example UnrealIRCd and InspIRCd servers.
- WinBot allows you to detect and automatically take action against common DoS (Denial of service) attacks against your bot, including OOB (Out Of Bounds) attacks, and ping floods.
- WinBot also has 'Web Extensions', a built-in module that allows you to broadcast an IRC conversation across the world wide web as a HTML page, so that your own web page can contain a real-time display of what is going off in an IRC channel.
- WinBot has an eggdrop-style party line that is accessed via DCC CHAT in mIRC. The party line has several advanced features not available in eggdrop, such as invisible channels (once inside an invisible channel, a user can only be seen by the bot owner) and channel limits, similar to on IRC itself.
- WinBot includes support for HTTP proxies, such as WinProxy and SQUID. This allows you to operate your bot in corporate environments if you wish, or on your home LAN. You may use a username and password to connect to a proxy server, if this is required.
- WinBot can handle a mirror feature, which the bot sits on two IRC servers, and will display the message from one server to the other, that the other server's users have said. Eggdrop however, can not perform this.
- WinBot has a scripting feature, called WBS (WinBot Script). It was developed, to replace scripting in mIRC because of its unreadable language. Also a perl addon can be downloaded, from the makers of Winbot, and used to write perl-like scripts to run on Winbot.
- Winbot was written in Delphi, and in C++ for certain areas of the program.
[edit] History
Winbot was a being developed by C. J. Edwards (Brain, the owner of the ChatSpike IRC server), under Crypt Software. It has been discontinued, and Mr. Edwards is now developing a newer open source bot, called "Botnix" (Wiki:BotNix). Today, Blahertech.com is now distributing WinBot 2.0-2.7 and the current source for 3.0. They are planning to further develop WinBot and to improve on what Craig Edwards once worked on. More information can be found on Sourceforge.net under projects/winbot.
