Eggdrop

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What Does Eggdrop Mean?

Eggdrop is an open-source Internet Relay Chat bot that was
originally designed to help IRC operators protect their channels from takeover
attempts. Eggdrop can also network other Eggdrop bots into a botnet. It is
written in C and offers extension capabilities in Tcl. It is designed to run on
Unix-like systems.

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Techopedia Explains Eggdrop

Eggdrop is one of the most popular bot programs on IRC. It was created by Robey Pointer in 1993 to protect the EFnet channel #gayteens from constant attacks in 1993. Writen in C, Eggdrop can be extended using Tcl scripts. Many Eggdrop users have added scripts doing things like running online games, managing users and channels, serving files and other IRC services. Eggdrop is typically used on shell account providers so users can compile and run the program.

One notable feature is the ability to form botnets of other instances of Eggdrop. These bots communicate with each other using DCC chat and telnet.

An Eggdrop user compiles Eggdrop from source on a shell provider that allows Eggdrop. Because of the potential for abuse by using botnets for things like distributed denial of service attacks, some IRC servers ban Eggdrop.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.