10 Sep 2003: I haven't worked on the bot recently, and it's been offline for a while. Nobody has complained, so I'm guessing nobody really cares. I'm going to abuse this page to link to my shirt commenting on International Terrorism, thanks.

20 Feb 2002: I believe I have this problem fixed, in addition there are two new commands... !ignore and !unignore which means any warning of the bots can (and will) be assumed to be malicious. There is a one warning grace period... if you warn a bot once, it won't talk to you ever again, but if you warn it more than once, it'll warn you anytime you talk to it.

19 Feb 2002: some people have been abusing my bot net's lack of warning protection.... I am working on that, and then I'll bring my bot net back up

It is now February, and I've got yet another ICQ number for the bot, as I forgot the password for the old one, and can't seem to get the password for it (never had any problems with the aimbots though *shrug*) the new number is 150317532, using the !bots command will show you the ICQ number that a bot has if I've got a bot running on ICQ.

I've gotten some good ideas through the sourceforge feedback stuff, and I hope to start working on adding some privacy control in about two weeks.

It is now January 2002, and I'm updating this page again. ICQ decided to cancel the account I was using for the bot on icq, it is now running on 146168691 instead. Hopefully this account will not be canceled. I also added a new command, !bots, that allows you to see how many users are allocated to each bot, and conviently get a list of the online bots at the current time. Apologies for the lack of updating, but I've been busy with school and a consulting job gone wrong.

It is November now, and I'm updating this web page. The bot has changed a lot, but not in obvious ways. Mike Creuzer has joined the project, and has been doing a lot of work in documentation, and user friendlyness, as well as in other areas. There have been two releases on sourceforge, looks like I'm doing about one a month, but development continues on CVS between releases. Generally, I think I'll do releases when major problems are fixed (this last release fixed long standing database stability issues). Both Mike and I are full time students at MSOE, but we are also looking for part time employment. His resume is pretty nicely formatted, but mine isn't. Both of us would love to have money that we could spend on improving the hardware that our copies of shear run on *wink* *wink*.

Well its September, and the weather thing didn't get added on, I'm back in school fulltime at MSOE so I don't know when I'll have time to work on it. I'm probably not going to add too many new things to it for a while.

Looking for help with the commands? click here

In general, the bots run as toastsaimbot0 and toastsaimbot1 on aim, and 146168691 on icq. I'm generally on aim as oventoast if you need to contact me or offer me a job. Feel free to email me as well.

Please check out bruinbot's website as he has some good ideas that i might be "borrowing" :)

This site is generously hosted by

You may want to check out the sourceforge project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shear/

You may also want to look through the CVS archives at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/shear

Enjoy