Btw I am not a lurker. In my free times, I like to hang out at some cool irc channels. I like to read and take part conversations happening in IRC channels. There are some channels, I don't want to miss a single word in conversations. But I cannot be online always and be part of those channels. Also most of channels are active in US daytime and in India it is night.

So I came up with having a bot which will be always logged in IRC channel 24/7. To run this bot, I have to use some server which is 24/7 up. I used my slicehost VPS slice for it. There is awesome command line, scriptable IRC client available on unix which is irssi. I used it on my server. To run irssi 24/7 you either need some background job or some cool solution like screen. I run this irssi version in screen

$screen

and just detach the screen (Ctrl+A and press D). So it keeps running on server even though I logout from server. To create daily log file for transcripts in particular channel just use /log command eg.

/LOG OPEN -targets #rubyonrails ~/irclogs/rubyonrails/rails-%Y-%m-%d

This command creates daily log files in irclogs directory. Now to get the email of this transcript file, just use the project mailer created by me. This simple project grabs our irc logs files and emails them to specified email address. You need to setup rake task this project provides in cron tab. and that's it.