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About Snowboard

While some say IRC is a dying method of communication it is still one of the most stable methods for a shared chat space on the Internet. The standard is rock solid, well documented, and widely implemented.

Snowboard is an IRC bot. It is designed to maintain an IRC channel and provide extended services to a channel or group of channels.

Why did we build it?

There are other standards for IRC bots on the market, however, there can be a lot of frustration on getting these to work. The most common of which is called Eggdrop which runs on a dated and aging code base. Configuring Eggdrop and writing scripts for it spawned me to look for alternatives and what I found was, depressing.

The goal of Snowboard is to make a single bot that is easily configured from the start. We use as many defaults as possible so that a configuration file can be as lean and clean as possible while maintaining the ability to customize the bot as one wishes.

Why python?

The project is written in Python because Python deals very well with strings of text and there is an actively developed and well documented set of libraries and functions that can be used with it.

IRC is a text-based protocol and thus dealing with text is an intergal part of supporting it, Python is ideal from that. The ability to quickly and efficiently deal with text makes Python ideal for IRC.

Finally, unlike a compiled language like C++ or C# (or Object Oriented C) there is a ton of flexibility in Python for moving between data types and since the code isn't compiled, the user can alter the code easily throughout the entire project.