Bottler (Internet Relay Chat client)

Bottler is an IRC client (or a plugin for an IRC client) that scans text sent from IRC offer bots such as XDCC offers, and also queries bots for file lists. It then lets the user download files without having to look for them themselves.

The original Bottler originated as a mIRC script in September 1996 created by DavidA and became a stand-alone application in 2002 whereupon it started gaining more widespread popularity. When IRC channel owners complained of their channels being overrun by Bottler users the author implemented a feature where Bottler would ignore channels with "-bottler" in the channel topic. Since the Bottler project was open source, Bottler clones appeared which circumvented this feature. Bottler proved popular for around three years before peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent appeared. The final version of Bottler was released to Sourceforge in March 2004.

Bottler has had multiple contributors, in chronological order of joining: DavidA (David), TimW (Tim), Spoon (Jim), and PURDooM (Brian).

Bottlers are in some cases regarded as a nuisance, causing some users to create scripts that can recognize bottlers and kick them before they get file lists. For this reason Blotter, a clone which was maintained by TimW after he left the Bottler project, became the most popular client as it was continuously updated to evade detection.

The official home page for Bottler is no longer maintained.

External links

*http://sourceforge.net/projects/bottler/