annoybots

The eggdrop and BMotion era, rebuilt as one Go binary

About

If you were on IRC in the early 2000s you remember the bots — eggdrop keeping the channel opped, BMotion babbling nonsense it learned from the last hour of chat. Both still exist. Both are also a TCL stack nobody wants to maintain in the 2020s.

annoybots is that whole idea rewritten in Go: one small binary holding many chat connections at once — IRC networks, Twitch, and Discord — with every channel routed through a shared annoyance engine.

The design decision that matters: personality is config, not code. A new bot is a new YAML file and a new pod, never a fork. The repo ships two examples, Echo and Mimic, to copy from.

What it does:

  • Triggers and interjections — keyword and regex triggers with randomized templated responses, plus unprompted ambient lines on a per-channel cooldown.
  • A learning brain — an order-N Markov chain that learns from channel chatter and babbles it back, mangled. It persists to disk, so learning survives a restart. This is the BMotion babble everyone remembers, minus the abandoned TCL.
  • Multi-network in one process — IRC and Twitch share a wire protocol, so Twitch just needs CAP negotiation, an oauth: token, and tighter rate limits. Discord rides the same engine alongside them.
  • Cross-network identity — !register and !link mean one person is one identity whether they showed up on IRC or Discord.
  • Games — karma, !roll, !8ball, and a full IdleRPG with items, battles, alignment, timed party quests, and a read-only web dashboard.
  • Channel keeping — eggdrop-style. An opped bot keeps its sibling bots opped and rejoins its channels if it gets kicked.
  • Lua plugins — drop a .lua file to add a !command, no rebuild.
  • A chat admin console — DM the bot to puppet it, edit quotes, manage channels and admins. Identity-authenticated and tiered by access flag.

Bots coordinate through a shared Redis bus, which is also how multi-bot skits work — one bot sets up, another lands the punchline. The whole thing is GitOps-deployed to Kubernetes, or there’s a Docker Compose stack if you’d rather not run a cluster to annoy your friends.