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Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 04:40:03 -0800 (PST)
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From: Bruce Gingery <bruce@TotSysSoft.com>
Subject: Re: ports/2241: eggdrop - A special TCL tool - an IRC Robotic Client.
Reply-To: Bruce Gingery <bruce@TotSysSoft.com>
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The following reply was made to PR ports/2241; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Bruce Gingery <bruce@TotSysSoft.com>
To: bitblt@sky.net
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ports/2241: eggdrop - A special TCL tool - an IRC Robotic Client.
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 05:31:54 -0700 (MST)

 Running ANY robotic package against a services, of any kind, without
 permission is a way to stir up trouble.  Quite a number of IRC nets
 permit reasonably used robotic processes.  Some restrict such things
 to those built-into clients as scripts, with a human also present on
 that login.  Others also allow robotic agents for various uses.
 
 Most of the IRCnets have built-in "channel service robots", and eggdrop
 has been shown to be (in recent versions) hardy, as well as eminently
 controllable.  To omit eggdrop from the PORTS collection just because
 it could be abused means that also the Perl5 libwww should be omitted
 from the ports collection because robotic WWW clients can be run which
 if run in depth-first search patterns and without regard to "robots.txt"
 can shut down a WWW server, if run from a higher bandwidth connection than
 that used by the WWW server.
 
 Eggdrop, unlike most of the IRCbots, extends IRC significantly, and can
 actually help to support IRC backbones.  Eggies have the built-in capacity
 to run a parallel "botnet" which can both cross IRCnets (without
 interfering with the normal IRCnet operation), and form entire
 communication paths which place NO load on the server.  This includes
 file transfer support (via normal DCC file transfers), chat-nets and
 the like.
 
 While Eggdrop is not the "end all" application for the internet, it can
 and does when used properly, extend IRC functionality.  Just because it
 also contains a potential for abuse, is not a reason to drop it from the
 ports.  
 
 There are clear recommendations to people installing Eggdrop in its
 documentation that they NOT direct such bots at servers which do not
 allow them.  It is such nuisance usages, along with other various
 "warring" behaviors (which some other IRCbots are designed for) which
 bring knee-jerk "G-Lines" and even "K-Lines" mentioned by bitblt@sky.net.
 
 	Bruce Gingery	<bgingery@gtcs.com>
 
 On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 bitblt@sky.net wrote:
 
 :}Date: Sun, 02 Feb 1997 15:07:07 +0000
 :}From: bitblt@sky.net
 :}To: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org, bgingery@gtcs.com
 :}Subject: Re: ports/2241: eggdrop - A special TCL tool - an IRC Robotic Client.
 :}
 :}Running this package is a good way to get your site banned from many irc
 :}servers.  I therefore urge the FreeBSD team to OMIT this package from
 :}the FreeBSD distribution.
 :}