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mIRC scripting was/is incredibly underrated, and was used for so much more than chat bots, as well. Among other things made easy, it provided a method of access

• CMay 4y ago
  mIRC scripting was great. The first real useful script I wrote connected to babelfish.altavista.com with raw sockets around the time that came out and would scrape the HTML results from queries for realtime chat translation. Their backend was basically SYSTRAN, so it was like SYSTRAN for IRC via HTTP scraping. Had to set the incoming and outgoing languages manually before any chat and avoid doing it in any high traffic channels, but was fine for private messaging. You had to write in a kind of simplified verbosity without expressing too much style or culture in order to have the most successful communication. That experience alone taught me a lot. It wouldn't surprise me if someone out there had already setup some rudimentary IRC translation before ~1997 without even needing to do an HTTP request by just having a word replacement flat file, but wasn't aware of one released publicly. Didn't share it at the time, because I was concerned it wouldn't scale well if it became popular and spammed the server with requests. Never did buy a license for mIRC and haven't really been on IRC since probably 2009 due to a mixture of Google Wave and Steam chat being sufficient, but ought to get around to that to give it the respect it deserved.