If you've been in the handmade network IRC, or a Twitch channel of someone related to the network, then you may have had the pleasure (or indeed, misfortune) of coming into contact with an IRC bot known as insobot.

I started this project in October of 2015 after having watched Handmade Hero and interacting with the community surrounding that series. Initially, it was just a simple markov chain bot and nothing else - inspired totally by ChronalDragon's chronal_robot that was once present in his own Twitch channel.

Since then, insobot has been rewritten in C99 and rearchitected around shared library 'modules', that all adhere to a common API and can be reloaded without the bot needing to be restarted.

I've added several modules to do things like URL unfurling, storing quotes for twitch channels, and , in memory of Fierydrake's late DrakeBot, notifying about which streams are live in HMN's #streams channel.

With these community-based additions, I felt it was appropriate to make things official and submit insobot as a project on handmade.network. With my thanks to the admin team, it has now been approved!

From here I hope to add any new and useful features to insobot that the community requests, as well as making the current features more properly documented and accessible.

I also want to support anyone that wishes to build their own modules for insobot, or run their own version with their own modules - I believe it could also be useful for IRC communities outside of handmade.network.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the project, the forums should now be open; feel free to share any ideas there. If you're interested in the source code, then you'll find it here on GitHub.

Thanks for reading!