Ok, so you've decided to try out Supybot.  That's great!  The more
people who use Supybot, the more people can submit bugs and help us to
make it the best IRC bot in the world :)

First things first: Supybot *requires* Python 2.3.  There ain't no
getting around it.  If you're a Python developer, you probably know
how superior 2.3 is to previous incarnations.  If you're not, just
think about the difference between a bowl of plain vanilla ice cream
and a banana split.  Or something like that.  Either way, *We're*
Python developers and we like banana splits.

So what do you do?  First thing you'll want to do is run (with
root/admin privileges) "python setup.py install".  This will install
Supybot globally.  If you need to install locally for whatever reason,
see the addendum near the end of this document.   You'll then have
several new programs installed where Python scripts are normally
installed on your system (/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin are common on
UNIX systems; C:\Python23\Scripts is a common place on Windows; and
(watch out, this is a long one :))
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin is a
common place on MacOS X.).  The two that might be of particular
interest to you, the new user, are "supybot" and "supybot-wizard".
The former ("supybot") is the script to run an actual bot; the latter
("supybot-wizard") is an in-depth wizard that provides a nice user
interface for creating configuration files for your bot.  We'd prefer
you to the use supybot-wizard, but if you're in a hurry or don't feel
like being asked many questions, just run supybot with no arguments
and it'll ask you only the questions necessary to run a bot.

So after running either of those two programs, you've got a nice
registry[*] file handy.  If you're not satisfied with your answers to
any of the questions you were asked, feel free to run the program
again until you're satisfied with all your answers.  Once you're
satisfied, though, run the "supybot" program with the registry file
you created as an argument.  This will start the bot; unless you
turned off logging to stdout, you'll see some nice log messages
describing what the bot is doing at any particular moment; it may
pause for a significant amount of time after saying "Connecting 
to ..." while the server tries to check its ident.

Ok, so let's assume your bot connected to the server fine and joined
the channels you told it to join.  For now we'll assume you named your
bot "supybot" (you probably didn't, but it'll make it much clearer in
the examples that follow to assume that you did).  We'll also assume
that you told it to join #channel (a nice generic name for a channel,
isn't it? :))  So what do you do with this bot that you just made to
join your channel?  Try this in the channel:

supybot: list

Replacing "supybot" with the actual name you picked for your bot, of
course.  Your bot should reply with a list of the plugins he currently
has loaded.  At least Admin, Channel, Config, Misc, Owner, and User
should be there; if you used supybot-wizard to create your
configuration file you may have many more plugins loaded.  The list
command can also be used to list the commands in a given plugin:

supybot: list Misc

Will list all the commands in the Misc plugin.  If you want to see the
help for any command, just use the help command:

supybot: help help
supybot: help list
supybot: help load

Sometimes more than one plugin will have a given command; for
instance, the "list" command exists in both the Misc and Config
plugins (both loaded by default).  List, in this case, defaults to
the Misc plugin, but you may want to get the help for the list
command in the Config plugin.  In that case, you'll want to give your
command like this:

supybot: help config list

Anytime your bot tells you that a given command is defined in several
plugins, you'll want to use this syntax ("plugin command") to
disambiguate which plugin's command you wish to call.  For instance,
if you wanted to call the Config plugin's list command, then you'd
need to say:

supybot: config list

Rather than just "list".

Speaking of the load command, that's the command you'll use to load
other plugins.  If you didn't use supybot-wizard, though, you might do
well to try it before playing around with loading plugins yourself:
each plugin has its own configure function that the wizard uses to
setup the appropriate registry entries if the plugin requires any.

Now, if you do want to play around with loading plugins, you're going
to need to have the owner capability.  If you ran the wizard, then
chances are you already added an owner user for yourself.  If not,
however, you can add one via the handy-dandy supybot-adduser script.
You'll want to run it while the bot is not running (otherwise it could
overwrite supybot-adduser's changes to your user database before you
get a chance to reload them).  Just follow the prompts, and when it
asks if you want to give the user any capabilities, say yes and then
give yourself the "owner" capability (without the quotes), restart the
bot and you'll be ready to load some plugins!

Now, in order for the bot to recognize you as your owner user, you'll
have to identify with the bot.  Open up a query window in your irc
client (/query should do it; if not, just know that you can't identify
in a channel because it requires sending your password to the bot).
Then type this:

help identify

And follow the instructions; the command you send will probably look
like this, with your owner user and password replaced:

identify myowneruser myuserpassword

The bot will tell you that "The operation succeeded" if you got the
right name and password.  Now that you're identified, you can do
anything that requires any privilege: that includes all the commands
in the Owner and Admin plugins, which you may want to take a look at
(using the list and help commands, of course).  One command in
particular that you might want to use (it's from the User plugin) is
the addhostmask command: it lets you add a hostmask to your user
record so the bot recognizes you by your hostmask instead of requiring
you to always identify with it before it recognizes you.  Use the help
command to see how this command works.  Here's how I often use it:

addhostmask myuser [hostmask] mypassword

You may not have seen that "[hostmask]" syntax before.  Supybot allows
nested commands, which means that any command's output can be nested
as an argument to another command.  The hostmask command from the Misc
plugin returns the hostmask of a given nick, but if given no
arguments, it returns the hostmask of the person giving the command.
So the command above adds the hostmask I'm currently using to my
user's list of recognized hostmasks.  I'm only required to give
mypassword if I'm not already identified with the bot.

Another command you might find yourself needing somewhat often is the
"more" command.  The IRC protocol limits messages to 512 bytes, 60 or
so of which must be devoted to some bookkeeping.  Sometimes, however,
Supybot wants to send a message that's longer than that.  What it
does, then, is break it into "chunks" and send the first one,
following it with "(X more messages)" where X is how many more chunks
there are.  To get to these chunks, use the more command.  One way to
try is to look at the help for the configuration variable
"supybot.defaultCapabilities".  Last I checked, it'll overflow into a
second chunk.  The command you'll need to do this is "config help
supybot.defaultCapabilities".

Enjoy using Supybot!


###
# Addenda
###
Local installs: See this forum post: http://tinyurl.com/2tb37

The Registry: The Supybot registry is somewhat similar to Window's
registry in concept, but completely different in implementation.
It's still a hierarchical representation of configuration data, but
it's in a completely text-based and easy-to-use/modify format.  We
think it's great :)