Is it ok for someone to sell mirc bots for $6 a month, as a service? Someone is doing that and it doesnt seem right.

the term "mirc bot" means its a bot someone has written using mIRC scripting language to run from mIRC as opposed to an eggie written in TCL to run from a *nix shell. they have nothing to do with mIRC itself or Khaled, any more than any script/addon written by someone does. My initial response was why pay for something you can easily make/run yourself. but i guess someone who thinks they simply MUST have a bot available 24/7 and doesnt have the means to do that might be willing to pay, just as some ppl pay for a shell to run their eggies from.

I would be concerned if the author is packaging mIRC.exe with a script that he is selling, as this is a more serious license violation. I'd also check if the executable has been patched or registered, turning it into a criminal offense of professional piracy which could land some serious jail time.

- Raccoon

The original poster specifically said 'as a service'. I'm pretty sure he's just talking about someone running mIRC off a Windows Server and charging people to run a bot from it. Nothing illegal about that.

But umm... last I checked, mIRC doesn't have NT service support.

A service as in providing a service as opposed to selling a product.

Hmm in that case then, I wouldn't waste my money. A program that is running "forever" and not running as an NT service is not really a good idea.

True. But then again running a 24/7 bot through mIRC was never gonna be the epitomy of high quality service. Tcl, Python, or Perl would make a whole lot more sense IMO.

Depends. I once put an eggdrop running TCL beside a mIRC bot with kick scripts and flood scripts, listening for an identical event. The mIRC bot crapped all over the eggdrop for swearkicks because mIRC deals with colour/bold code avoidance of swear detection far better. The mIRC bot was in his jammies and on his knees saying his nightly prayers even before the eggdrop got to the middle of "ahhh he swore". The eggdrop handled flood/repeat kicking better though but it's performance didn't shine through until I did a mass-flood with a few clones.

Overall I believe that the reason why mIRC bots arn't convenient is due to the lack of availablilty of affordable hosting for them. In my view, if you run a Windows box 24/7 which hosts a mIRC bot guarding a room of less than 500 users then a mIRC bot is perfectly adequate. There's no real need to pay for a shell account simply because something might be better yet not give any real performance boost based on one's circumstances. An eggdrop would only be better if the load required the difference in performance to be better.

hmm.. i can never get a "mirc bot" kick the ass out of a eggdrop.. if that eggdrop didnt respond so fast, it couldent be lag? or many useless TCL's loaded in them? im faster then the bots on bans in one of my channels, but the bots are damn so fast with other things.. so it all depends on server/connection, TCL loaded, what box u running it on, how much that box have to work with.. and a eggdrop handles colors/bold/underline great, just make a TCL for it. and the best thing.. you can link eggdrops and they work together.. i cant imagin what a huge script mirc would need for the same type of "partyline" and functions

The good thing about an eggdrop, aside from the features they have is that they can handle being in dozens of rooms whereas in my experience, a mIRC bot can handle about 20 quite well. As for my experiment, there was 0% lag (or close enough to it) as I did it on my LAN. The trouble with many distributed mIRC bots is that they come complete with dialogue based settings arrangements and are usually chock-full of .INI files or global variables to store the settings such as the number of lines in BLAH seconds before a flood kick is triggered, etc. And that has to slow mIRC down a bit. I don't believe in that method though and my mIRC bot has all the settings coded into the scripts themselves.

In addition to what I said above, my network uses all of what Starbucks said above, mIRC, Eggdrop and Perl (SecureServ). Each has their own roles and each do that particular role better than the other two.

Lastly, yes, you are right about the partyline script being BIG in mIRC though for the life of me I do not understand the concept of that feature and have never used it.

BTW: In reply to the original post here, I would think that it is perfectly okay to either sell mIRC bots, rent them out or rent out hosting for them though personally I am against the former if only because I am accustomed to the understanding that open source (which a mIRC script is) should be free of charge. At any rate there's little, if any, hope of enforcing any licence on a mIRC script of any kind.

mIRC is a lot easyer to script

id have to agree with u that if you have a small channel and ur able to be online 25/7 then there is absolutly no need to pay for a host running *nix to use an eggdrop. i run a simple bot for my channel and its on as long as my pc is on ... cometimes upto and over 2 weeks ..... really all i run it for is stats generation purposes .. with simple ops commands for users with specific levels ... id definatly not be payin money for something like that tho

mIRC scripting is a lot easier to learn, yes. But once you know another langauge it's really no harder to use that language than mIRCscript. There are already dozens of pre-existing IRC frameworks and basic IRC bots available for languages like the ones I listed above, making them as easy as mIRC when it comes to making a 24/7 bot.

Running a mIRC bot is fine for a small channel or two. But, if it's running on a dozen channels or more and doing some heavy duty stuff (real-time statistics, protection, etc.) then mIRC just won't cut it either because the script won't be able to take it or the connection (assuming we're on someone's regular DSL/cable line) which start to fail. Plus it means that person can't use their connection for much else. If we're talking about hosting on a remote Windows server then I would imagine it would be as expensive if not more so (especially one that allows you to run mIRC on it) than a simple shell account, which means you might aswell use a more 'appropriate' language anyway.

Naeh sit down and look at a TCL script.. its not that diffrent from the code in mirc, many things looks the same, and many things is used the same way..

Well this whole thread was about selling mirc bots being legal? it sorta got sidetracked lol

It's not really sidetracked. I addressed the issue raised directly only 6 posts ago and when something is bought or sold suitability is usually a key factor in purchase, Suitability for a purpose is what is getting discussed here.

a couple days agi i was looking at some stuff for my home business and i saw a server for windows and as a services would allow u to run chat programs like when u buy a shell u get bitchX... cept this one had windows clients like mIRC, pIRCH and many others.. thats probably what it is

To be honest with everyone here I'd never trust a channel bot to a third party (IE: Webhost or shell provider). Bots require authentication, either with the nickname, founders password or oper password. I'm too security conscious to let that go to anyone but myself so I will always host my own bot on my own machine, which incidentally is bolted to the desk and a few internal mods to make the hard disc useless on any other machine.