Cont is a "continuity" bot, designed to inform people of what was happening on-channel immediately prior to their joining it.  This information is referred to as "context".

Once Cont is running on a channel, it will store the last ten events in a buffer.  When you join a channel, any of the events that happened after you last left it (voluntarily or otherwise) are sent to you via private message.  (Events you already saw don't get sent to you - this is to prevent flooding if you get kicked repeatedly, etc.)

Cont operates on an "opt-in" basis: to be provided with context, you must have previously registered with Cont by giving it the command "enable context".  

Similarly, you can disable the provision of context for your nick with the command "disable context".

For instant context at any time (eg if mIRC has decided yet again that it knows better than you regarding what nick you want to use), give Cont the command "instacontext".

For online help, try asking Cont for "help".

The current codebase for Cont is not amazingly elegant: a lot of hooks have been implemented for a planned extension to allow the bot to provide context for multiple channels, but I was unable to think of a way of implementing this that I was happy with, so at the moment it should be used on one channel only.

Cont is released under the GPL version 2 - see COPYING for details.

Cont includes a copy of the Pircbot Java IRC API, also licensed under the GPL, and available separately from http://www.jibble.org/pircbot.php

A cut-down version of Cont was published in the O'Reilly book "IRC Hacks": see http://www.jibble.org/irchacks for details.

Steve Jolly, April 2004
