Confusion!!!
Okies ... a little background. The idea is that when someone says a public trigger in the channel, that only on bot will respond to it, even though they are all running the same code (got a bit fed up with using different command characters for each bot...)
The only sensible way to do this was to elect a 'spokesbot' on each channel that would decide who responded to what - this would be done by election (hence the sending a message to each bot in the channel) based on things such as processor speed, netspeed, number of bots on this host, etc. These elections to be held when a bot joins the channel, parts the channel or gets split.
The problem with the 'nick keeper' bot is that it keeps my nick (Photon) when I'm not there. Therefore it has two nicks, either one of which it could have at any time (Scratchy or Photon). This casued a problem with the boptnet initially, but then I discovered - set a botnetnick that is always scratchy and the problem is solved. ahhhhh no....
Now I have the problem that when I trawl through the bot list, I get the botnetnick for each bot (in Scratchy's case 'Scratchy'), and doing a handonchan (or whatever) it fails, 'cos Scratchy is Photon in the channel.
Ppslims idea is interesting - I'll have to try that, but it would seem that the whole user records are confused, 'cos if I do a whois on Scratchy when he is Photon, it tells me its hand is Photon, which is MY hand!!!
Confused yet?? I am....
At the moment its working with doing a zapf_broad (putallbots to ya tclers) with each bot fast rejecting due to not being on the channel - but this is a waste of bandwidth (oh and the election has to be held over time, rather than waiting for n responses as it did before). If only I had a botnetnick_to_hand then it wall all be easily sorted, but unfortunately it would seem that the only person that knows that info is the bot itself...
(thinks : now I could waste even more bandwidth getting the bot to tell me .. lol)