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 "Botnet" below), but it also consists of a console through which you can watch channel activity and give commands.

To enter the party line, just offer a DCC chat to your bot. It should ask for your password if you've set one. If you haven't set one, be sure to do so, so that you can use the /msg "ident" command and other goodies that require some sort of security.

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 bot-only channels, only people on the current bot you are on can chat to you on there channels.

Commands for the console start with a dot (.), similar to the slash (/) used for IRC. At any time you can type ".help" to get a list of the possible commands. To find out what a command does, use ".help <command>" -- for example, ".help channel". This documentation's appendix has the on-line help files for you to browse at your leisure.

When you're on the party line, anything you type that doesn't start with a dot is considered to be broadcast to everyone else, just like talking on a channel. You can change channels with the ".chat" command or even leave all channels with ".chat off".

© 1997 Robey Pointer
© 1999,2000 Eggheads