Last revised: December 31, 2001

The Party Line

The most important way you will communicate with your bot is through the party line. The party line is accessible via DCC chat or telnet. It’s pretty much just a miniature, lag-less IRC (see doc/BOTNET), but it also consists of a console through which you can watch channel activity and give commands.

To enter the party line, DCC chat or open a telnet connection to your bot. It should ask for your password if you’ve set one. If you don’t have one set, use the /msg <bot> PASS <new password> command to set one.

The party line is actually split up into 200,000 “channels”. The console is available from each channel, but you can only talk to people who are on your current channel (just like IRC). Channel 0 is the main party line, while others are typically reserved for private conversations. Channels 1-99,999 are botnet wide chat channels and any user joining that channel anywhere on the botnet will be able to chat with you. Channels *0-*99,999 are local channels (only people on the bot you are on can chat with you on these channels).

Console commands start with a dot (.), similar to the slash (/) used for IRC commands. At any time, you can type “.help all” to get a list of all possible commands. To find out what a command does, use “.help <command>”. For example: “.help channel”.

When you’re on the party line, anything you type that doesn’t start with a dot (.), a comma (,), or an apostrophe (’) is considered to be broadcast to everyone else, just like talking on a channel. A message prefixed with a comma goes only to other bot owners (+n). A message prefixed with an apostrophe is sent to all users on the local bot only. You can change channels with the “.chat” command or even leave all channels with “.chat off”.

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