Welcome
Here is a brief description of some of the bots that have inhabited #HelpDesk in its 10-year history.
- Clerk (The First) - Eggdrop. Run by zaz starting shortly after #HelpDesk was formed in the spring 1996. This bot departed #HelpDesk later that summer.
- b0t - mIRC. This was a bot written by IcedFire that was run for several months in 1997. It emulated an eggdrop bot quite well with a party line and customizable info lines. b0t also had a cookie script and auto help that made him quite popular. The ops and users of #HelpDesk really loved this bot and much was lost when it was removed from the channel to make way for Connector.
- Connector - ircII Epic4/Eggdrop. IC started this robot shortly after b0t had appeared in the channel, near the end of 1997, it ran into early 1998. Originally it was started off as an IrcII Epic 4 bot, and was later converted to eggdrop when Venatori became bot administrator.
- Clerk (The Second) - Eggdrop. This was the bot Venatori switched to in 1998.
- Clerk (The Third) - Pure C. When Venatori left the channel Sedition had already started working on a new version of Clerk in C. It ran from the summer to the end of 1998.
- IO - mIRC. When Sedition left, the channel Clerk (III) left with him. Logik started on his replacement, another 100% mIRC scripted bot, IO. The original IO ran from late 1998 to the middle of 1999.
- IO - mIRC (New Ownership). In the middle of 1999 Logik changed platforms to Linux and thus had no way to continue running IO. At that time MIMP received the code for this bot and, along with the help of Pasmal, worked to improve it to it's present state.
- IO - mIRC (New Location, New Code). Just after Y2K clocked over, MIMP moved from British Columbia Canada, to Colorado USA. I'm sure he misses the Canadian scenery but oh well =). Since this move work has been undertaken to completely rewrite IO to remove code that was around when 5.02 was.
- IO2 - mIRC. IO2 is a completely new bot which was in development for some time. It came into official channel use around August 2000. IO2's most notable feature was its web-based authentication feature, allowing authorized users to use the same password for the #HelpDesk web site and bot control.
- IO2 (New Ownership). CWhiz, drum, Coult, and Rotantor took over operation of IO in July 2002. The new team continued to implement bug fixes and operated IO until the DALnet DDOS attacks caused the nick to be inadvertently dropped on November 21, 2002. During this period, IO2 received numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.
- HCBT. Launched a few days after IO's final departure, HCBT is #HelpDesk's current bot, managed by LocutusOfBorg.