All of these can be found on the main SkinnyBot page

1. Install skinnybrown.jar, instructions can be found on the net.skinnybown page.
2. Unzip SkinnyBot.zip
3. Open up the directory you just created, and look for the directory that contains SkinnyBotMain.class. Put pircbot.jar in this directory.
4. Open up a command prompt and type:

   java -cp pircbot.jar SkinnyBotMain

   If you are not comfortable using the command prompt, and you are running windows, then double click on SkinnyBot.bat, but I recommend using the command prompt.

Skinnybot will load up, and attempt to connect to irc.quakenet.org. If successfull, it will join #skinnybot and #bots. If you load up your IRC client and join these channels, you should be able to chat to it. If you don't have an IRC client, don't worry, there are loads out there for free. At the moment, I use WinBot, its not perfect but works. I am currently writing my own irc client, so look out for that as it will more than likely integrate well with SkinnyBot.

Once you are in a channel with your bot, you can start doing things with it. By default, most commands require you to start the sentance with the bot's name, for example if you want to know the time, then type

SkinnyBot time

If you don't want to type the bot's name, then you can use the command character instead. The command character is specified in the config file, and can be used in place of the bot's name. By default, the character is a "\" (back slash), so rather than type the above command, you can type

\time

If there are multiple SkinnyBot's in the same channel, then you should try to make sure they all have different command characters, otherwise they will all respond at the same time.

The help command will give you a list of commands that you can use, and

\help <command>

will give you command specific help. You should note that, not all commands are listed by the help function. A command will only be listed if it has help text associated with it. Some commands diliberately do not have help associated with them to prevent them from being listed. These are all commands that most IRC users don't need to see, because they can't use them. The only person who can use these commands is the bot's owner. These commands can be found in the SimonSays plugin. The SimonSays plugin allows you to make the bot do things like say things, perform actions, join/leave channels etc.

Another command that you may like to know is

\good bye

This makes the bot say good bye, quit the server, and exit the program. Full documentation of all of the commands can be found on the plugins page.

Editing the config file

You will almost certainly want to edit the config file of your bot, so here are the things you can put in, and what they mean.

All entries are in the form <name>=<value>. They can appear in any order, but are case sensative. The config file can have blank lines anywhere, and unrecognised lines will be ignored, but will be removed if the bot has to make changes to the config file.

server=irc.quakenet.org

This is the server that the bot will connect to.

nick=SkinnyBot

This is the nick the bot will try to use. If the nick is in use, the program will exit. This will be improved in future releases.

errorLog=Errors.log

When an error occurs within SkinnyBot, it can usually continue without too much disruption. Any errors that are detected will be logged to the named log file. If your bot does have errors in it, then you (or somebody who knows about java) can look in the log file and see what went wrong, when it happened, and where abouts in the program the error occured. Errors are prepended to the log, so the most recent error will always be at the top of the file. If you are running more than one bot, you should use different log files.

owner=YourLogin

This tells the bot who is allowed to perfrom certain restricted operations. You will need to change this to whatever login you use (probably decided by your irc client), otherwise you won't get full control of the bot.

channel=#skinnybot

Tells the bot which channels to join. You can have as many of these lines as you wish. If the channel has a key, then this can be specified after the channel name, for example if you had a channel called #privacy with bigsecret as the key, then you would put channel=#privacy bigsecret

verbose=true

This line decides wether or not verbose output is printed to the terminal window. This is only really of any use, when things go wrong.

commandChar=\

The character that can be used in place of the bot's name. If there is more than one SkinnyBot in a channel, then they should have different command charaters. The command character doesn't have to be just one character, but it is not very helpfull to have more.

plugin=seen

This line tells skinnybot which plugins should be loaded. You can have as many of these lines as you like. Plugins must be in the skinnybot\plugin directory. If you specify an invalid pluign, the line will be removed from the config file.

That's the end of the tutorial, you should now be ready to use your own bot.

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