So anyway, I joined the channel where this alleged bot using the
nickname ``Tempest'' lurked, and promptly sent something like twenty
control-i's, one right after the other... Looks pretty on most clients, but
the bot didn't like this activity, and immediately kicked me with the words,
"Avalanche flood detected." Bingo! Now I knew I was dealing with an Eggdrop
bot. (There are other ways to find bots that want to be hidden, but, until
recently, this was the most reliable, since the detection code was hard-wired
directly into the bot code and not readily user-configurable.)

The next step was to imitate the bot, and to do this I would need to
secure the nickname the bot used, ``Tempest''. Of course, not even the most
secure, stable connections last forever, and so the Tempest bot eventually
lost its connection and had to establish a new one. Fortunately for me, I had
configured three other bots to try their damnedest to use the nickname
``Tempest'', and so the odds were in my favor that I would eventually get it
the next time the Tempest-bot had to reconnect. It turns out that I did.

Once one of my bots inevitably secured the nickname for me, I killed them off 
and gave it to my own client. This is when the fun started. Within
ten minutes, I began getting lots of private messages from unknown users that
contained simple one-line phrases such as ``op hosehead'', or ``op 152 34''.

People were joining IRC and, as part of their startup, their clients were set
to automatically send a /msg to ``Tempest'' with the words ``op hosehead''
(for example). This is the method used to beg channel operator status from an
Eggdrop bot, and they were sending it to me instead. Bingo!