IRC nickname: Tern Real Name: Steve Rusher Age: 21 Location: Rochester, NY Musical Preferences: Korn, Gravity Kills, Sevendust, Limp Bizkit, Snot, Ultraspank, Deftones, Coal Chamber, Prodigy, Rammstein, Tool, the new Vanilla Ice, and 1000 Homo DJs

The B.otch Story...

    One day, I was on IRC when `Ultima (no longer a regular) introduced me to Hotline.  On the Boffomac Hotline server, I found a script called "Merlin."  I downloaded it, loaded it, and it didn't run at all.  I read the docs, and wound up in Undernet's #irclescript.  Good fortune put both NetFusion (Merlin's creator) and Natael in the channel at the same time.  Who was Natael?  I had no clue.  After no resolves to my Merlin problem, I decided to try writing my own scripts.  The first was a greetscript, which was never very good.  After that failed, I decided to write a bot.  Enter BasicBot.  BasicBot was a good bot.  It did all the basic stuff, but really was a modest thing.  Soon, though, I was up in arms with ShadowBot, an obviously large threat.  A basic bot would apparently not do.  So, I began work with FlipzSide, who before was just a whiz-kid on caffiene, to develop the framework for a more powerful, nimble, fast, and furious bot.

    B.otch's development was under way!  Though its feature list was small, it ran like a charm!  Later, prefs saving was made, and I got one universal response: The file load simply did not work.  I ditched the prefs for a while, until I found that my File IO addition was seriously out of date.  Ugh!  After tons of code rewriting, it finally worked.  Shortly after, Jos Delbar (Admin of #ev) began to puke at the very sight of ShadowBots, which apparently gave me an edge.  I earned several ShadowBot converts, and began to realize my potential.  Jos was, however, a 2-edged sword.  While he supported my efforts, he was also developing AIrc, a Perl bot script.  Competition grew sharp.  ;)  The push for shared features grew, and our feature lists grew quite parallel, and eventually divided again anyways.

    Later, Natael taught me Dialog Director programming.  Hurray!  This meant a GUI was now possible!!!  With 100K and 25+ pages of source code, and no end in sight, the saga continued...

    After B.otch's initial success, I decided to broaden my horizons.  Well... I was getting bored too.  A bartender script named "Sc.otch" was born.  After it was riddled with bugs, and its purpose was deemed obsolete, I aborted it.

    Of course, a failed "just for fun" script did not shake me in the slightest.  I started working vigorously on a message board script named IRCBBS.  A rather crude name, which was later changed to IRCBoard.  After 6 hours on the first day, almost every essential was complete.  Hurray for me.  After a bit, its popularity sat in the dumps, but still, I found that this was a very one-of-a-kind script, so I worked on it some more.  After several interface revamps, it was indeed looking quite good.

    Later down the line, B.otch 5.3, with FlipzSide's FlipWire junk coded in, several bugs were introduced.  I needed to update it!  However, then, I decided for some unknown reason, to make an FServer script.  With PhilMacG3 still breathing down my neck, I'll never by numero uno, but it's better than Ircle's standard FServe.  hehe

    Finally, we reach today...  5.4 has been released, as has IRCBoard, and Shogun FServe.  May you all have a fun time with my scripts, and please register B.otch.  It is free.  Now you have a bit of info to follow me by, and if you trace your footsteps and pass me in the road of life, I'll just have to try harder.  I can not move up a place if I am idling at #1.  If B.otch is replaced, it will no doubt be by something better, and more powerful.  This will be a great victory not only for them, but for me, knowing that someone has taken my work seriously enough to try against it.  For whether I am outdone or not, at least I'll always know that at least once, I was taken seriously...

Thank you.  Click HERE to return to the credits.  :)