Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make my Supybot connect to multiple servers?

Just use the connect command in the Network plugin.

Why does my bot not recognize me or tell me that I don’t have the ‘owner’ capability?

Because you’ve not given it anything to recognize you from!

You’ll need to identify with the bot (help identify to see how that works) or add your hostmask to your user record (help hostmask add to see how that works) for it to know that you’re you.

You may wish to note that addhostmask can accept a password; rather than identify, you can send the command:

hostmask add myOwnerUser [hostmask] myOwnerUserPassword

and the bot will add your current hostmask to your owner user (of course, you should change myOwnerUser and myOwnerUserPassword appropriately for your bot).

What is a hostmask?

Each user on IRC is uniquely identified by a string which we call a hostmask. The IRC RFC refers to it as a prefix. Either way, it consists of a nick, a user, and a host, in the form nick!user@host. If your Supybot complains that something you’ve given to it isn’t a hostmask, make sure that you have those three components and that they’re joined in the appropriate manner.

My bot can’t handle nicks with brackets in them!

It always complains about something not being a valid command, or about spurious or missing right brackets, etc.

You should quote arguments (using double quotes, like this: "foo[bar]") that have brackets in them that you don’t wish to be evaluated as nested commands. Otherwise, you can turn off nested commands by setting supybot.commands.nested to False, or change the brackets that nest commands, by setting supybot.commands.nested.brackets to some other value (like <>, which can’t occur in IRC nicks).

I added an alias, but it doesn’t work!

Take a look at help <alias you added>. If the alias the bot has listed doesn’t match what you’re giving it, chances are you need to quote your alias in order for the brackets not to be evaluated. For instance, if you’re adding an alias to give you a link to your homepage, you need to say:

alias add mylink "format concat http://my.host.com/ [urlquote $1]"

and not:

alias add mylink format concat http://my.host.com/ [urlquote $1]

The first version works; the second version will always return the same url.

What does ‘lobotomized’ mean?

I see this word in commands and in my channels.conf, but I don’t know what it means. What does Supybot mean when it says “lobotomized”?

A lobotomy is an operation that removes the frontal lobe of the brain, the part that does most of a person’s thinking. To “lobotomize” a bot is to tell it to stop thinking–thus, a lobotomized bot will not respond to anything said by anyone other than its owner in whichever channels it is lobotomized.

The term is certainly suboptimal, but remains in use because it was historically used by certain other IRC bots, and we wanted to ease the transition to Supybot from those bots by reusing as much terminology as possible.

Is there a way to load all the plugins Supybot has?

No, there isn’t. Even if there were, some plugins conflict with other plugins, so it wouldn’t make much sense to load them. For instance, what would a bot do with Factoids, MoobotFactoids, and Infobot all loaded? Probably just annoy people :)

If you want to know more about the plugins that are available, check out our plugin index at our website.

Is there a command that can tell me what capability another command requires?

No, there isn’t, and there probably never will be.

Commands have the flexibility to check any capabilities they wish to check; while this flexibility is useful, it also makes it hard to guess what capability a certain command requires. We could make a solution that would work in a large majority of cases, but it wouldn’t (and couldn’t!) be absolutely correct in all circumstances, and since we’re anal and we hate doing things halfway, we probably won’t ever add this partial solution.

Why doesn’t Karma seem to work for me?

Karma, by default, doesn’t acknowledge karma updates. If you check the karma of whatever you increased/decreased, you’ll note that your increment or decrement still took place. If you’d rather Karma acknowledge karma updates, change the supybot.plugins.Karma.response configuration variable to “On”.

Why won’t Supybot respond to private messages?

The most likely cause is that you are running your bot on the Freenode network. Around Sept. 2005, Freenode added a user mode which registered user could set that blocks private messages from unregistered users. So, the reason you aren’t seeing a response from your Supybot is:

• Your Supybot is not registered with NickServ, you are registered, and you have set the +E user mode for yourself.
• or you have registered your Supybot with NickServ, you aren’t registered, and your Supybot has the +E user mode set.

Can users with the “admin” capability change configuration?

Currently, no. Feel free to make your case to us as to why a certain configuration variable should only require the admin capability instead of the owner capability, and if we agree with you, we’ll change it for the next release.

How can I make my Supybot log my IRC channel?

To log all the channels your Supybot is in, simply load the ChannelLogger plugin, which is included in the main distribution.

How do I find out channel modes?

I want to know who’s an op in a certain channel, or who’s voiced, or what the modes on the channel are. How do I do that?

Everything you need is kept in a ChannelState object in an IrcState object in the Irc object your plugin is given. To see the ops in a given channel, for instance, you would do this:

irc.state.channels['#channel'].ops

To see a dictionary mapping mode chars to values (if any), you would do this:

irc.state.channels['#channel'].modes

From there, things should be self-evident.

Can Supybot connect through a proxy server?

Supybot is not designed to be allowed to connect to an IRC server via a proxy server, however there are transparent proxy server helpers like tsocks that are designed to proxy-enable all network applications, and Supybot does work with these.

Why can’t Supybot find the plugin I want to load?

Why does my bot say that ‘No plugin “foo” exists.’ when I try to load the foo plugin?

First, make sure you are typing the plugin name correctly. @load foo is not the same as @load Foo [1]. If that is not the problem,

[1]	Yes, it used to be the same, but then we moved to using directories for plugins instead of a single file. Apparently, that makes a difference to Python.

I’ve found a bug, what do I do?

Submit your bug on GitHub through our project page.

Is Python installed?

I run Windows, and I’m not sure if Python is installed on my computer. How can I find out for sure?

Python isn’t commonly installed by default on Windows computers. If you don’t see it in your start menu somewhere, it’s probably not installed.

The easiest way to find out if Python is installed is simply to download it and try to install it. If the installer complains, you probably already have it installed. If it doesn’t, well, now you have Python installed.