People on IRC are recognized by the bot according to their user@host. That is, if I am on IRC as:

*** [Kirk] is ikaney@uk.defiant.org (Fortune favors the bold.)

then Eggdrop will identify me according to "ikaney@uk.defiant.org" and not by my nickname. I can change nicknames at will and it won't forget me.

For convenience, it's useful to have a "handle" which always identifies the same person. Usually the "handle" is just whatever nickname some- one was using when the bot first learned them. The nickname you had when you first said "hello" to Eggdrop is the handle it will know you by, regardless of whatever nickname you may be using at a given time.

Because of this, only one person can have a given handle on your bot. Masters can change it, and anyone with party-line access can change their own handle, but it's intended to be something stable -- unlike nicknames on IRC which are about as stable as Jello.

Eggdrop likes to store a lot of information about each user. The most important thing stored is the list of hostmasks that a user is recognized by. You can add a new hostmask with the /msg "ident" command. Masters can add and remove hostmasks with the party-line commands ".adduser", ".+host", and ".-host".

Other things that are stored include the user's flags (see Flags section), the last time he/she was on a channel, an optional comment, their current directory in the file area, an info line which can be displayed when they join a channel, and possibly even some other things that Tcl scripts store.

© 1997 Robey Pointer
© 1999,2000 Eggheads