Question

I’m learning Python and would like to start a small project. It seems that making IRC bots is a popular project amongst beginners so I thought I would implement one. Obviously, there are core functionalities like being able to connect to a server and join a channel but what are some good functionalities that are usually included in the bots? Thanks for your ideas.

Answer 1

Unless it’s solely for the educational experience, you should really just use a framework for the core functionality.

That said, here’s some of the things the bot in my home IRC channel does:

• Choose one item from a list of options
• Display a random entry from the Linux fortunes file
• Display a random set of words from the Emacs spook file
• Check every line from a user and display a quote from The Big Lebowski if it’s sufficiently similar (this is probably a bit my-channel specific 🙂 )
• Check if a link has been mentioned before and say who/when (we all read the same RSS feeds and tend to duplicate links a lot)
• Conduct a poll
• Pull a given quote from our internal QDB
• Check if a given link has been posted to Reddit, and give the corresponding Reddit thread link if so. If a Reddit link is posted, give the direct link instead
• Track the last time a given nick was in the channel, and the last time they spoke
• Queue a message for an offline nick that’s automatically sent in-channel when they join
• Use Google Translate to translate a given phrase
• Post a given line to our channel’s Twitter feed
• Choose a random user and kick them (not the best idea depending on how unruly your channel is)
• Pull the summary of a given term from Wikipedia and display it along with a link to the full article
• Display information about any posted Youtube link (video title, length, submitter, votes, comments, etc.)