Avarice for IRC/XDCC Bot IRC Searching
February 25, 08 by sharky 15,686 views
Every once in a while a P2P utility comes along that really captures our attention, and so deservedly earns an honorable spot all by itself at FileShareFreak. Such is the case with Avarice. Avarice is a multi-server IRC client designed to simplify XDCC file transfers - so simplified that users need not even know what IRC is in order to use it. Moreover, Avarice should be rightfully classified as a P2P program unto itself.
Unlike other IRC “scripts”, Avarice is a stand-alone IRC client that mimics the behavior of a P2P program. And since IRC is a goldmine for copyrighted content that exists at the apex of the piracy pyramid, it is an essential tool used in facilitating XDCC IRC searching.
The best feature about Avarice is in the search results. When treated as a regular P2P program, users need not worry about the quality of the files in the results - everything that should be, will be! Unlike public BitTorrent sites with all the publicly-submitted junk .torrents and Limewire-style P2P programs with the bogus files and anti-P2P corruption - XDCC Bots don’t suffer the same maladies. They are a highly-organized group of file servers from the upper echelon of piracy, itself. Avarice cuts out the middlemen and brings you right to the heart of “the scene” for newbies and experts alike.
Setup/Installation
To get the most out of Avarice, we recommend that you follow these procedures.
1. Download Avarice from http://avarice.cc/downloads.html. Run the SETUP and install.
2. Download and install the ‘Trap Channel Eliminator‘ (TCE) program (from the link above).
3. Update your “servers.ini” file. Since Avarice is an ongoing project, the developers keep an updated index of current (spidered) XDCC servers. We cannot stress enough the importance to update this file - the servers.ini that comes with Avarice is from March, 2007. First, just try to download the servers.ini file and save it to your hard drive. If it just opens up to a ‘text’ display in your browser, you’ll need to visit their servers link, and choose EDIT > Select All from the menu in your browser (Firefox). Right click it, select “copy” and create a text file (i.e. with Notepad) and ‘paste’ the data. Save the new file as “servers.ini” and transfer to your C:\Program Files\Avarice folder, be sure to overwrite the old file.
4. Run the Trap Channel Eliminator program (either from the desktop icon or your Start Button). You’ll want to first point to two files: 1. The updated servers.ini file and 2. the traps.ini file. Click the corresponding buttons and ‘browse’ to these files - see below:
Running Avarice
Launch Avarice - click on the Networks button at the top - the first thing you’ll notice is a list of IRC servers in the main window. Click the “Connect to all Servers” button:
Avarice comes with a couple of different features. You can either start searching the XDCC bots in the connected IRC channels, or you can ‘browse’ what the XDCC bots have to offer.
Browsing the ‘Bots
To browse the XDCC bots, click on the OFFERS button from the top menu. The main window will show (in real-time) exactly all of the files that are being served up in the connected IRC channels. Avarice takes some time to index all of the bots, but you’ll soon see the amount of content is staggering! This list never ends - as new XDCC bots enter a channel, they too will be indexed and added to the list of available files.
You’ll be able to toggle the data columns to arrange the results by name, size, available free slots. Free slots, (if you didn’t know) mean you’ll not be placed in a queue sequence and the download should commence immediately (in most cases). This is handy when arranging the data by description and deciding what like-content will warrant the best chances for instant downloading.
To download a file, simply double-click it. It will now appear in your TRANSFERS menu. We can also tell you that download speeds will vary depending on the speed of the XDCC bot that is doling out the files. Bot speeds are generally quite good - and in our tests we managed to easily max out our download bandwidth. We were able to download a full DVDRIP movie (700MB) in about 12 minutes. Take a look at those speeds:
Searching the ‘Bots
Searching is fairly straight-forward - click the SEARCH menu button and conduct your searches.
NOTE: Search results work best if you first let Avarice index the XDCC bots for a good 10 minutes. Not only will this give you a greater overall selection, but you’ll be able to compare similar content and select files that have available free slots. This is where using the filtering (by clicking the ‘description‘ column heading) comes in handy. (Also note, after running Avarice for 2 hours, there were 60,000 available XDCCs from over 2,200 Bots - proof that letting it run for awhile increases searching).
Below is a screenshot where we searched for “Alvin and the Chipmunks”, and the data was arranged by available “Free Slots” to facilitate faster downloads. Notice that most of the results are proper “scene” releases, as vindicated by the filenames. That’s IRC for you! To download, just double-click a desired name. The file will now appear in your TRANSFERS menu.
Avarice - Advanced Settings
As mentioned before, users of Avarice don’t need to know anything about IRC, and can treat this as a regular P2P search program. However, it does contain full-fledged features for the IRC gurus - if you already have your own favorite networks/servers (and channels) that don’t exist in the Avarice servers.ini file, you’ll be able to add your own. Select NETWORKS > Server Editor and edit the existing servers (to add specific channels) or click “Add Servers” where new IRC Networks can be created (scroll down to the bottom and select NEW NETWORK).
LAST NOTE: The default download path for Avarice is:
C:\Program Files\Avarice\Completed
However, this can easily be changed in the PREFERENCES menu. Additional changes can also be made to your personal IRC settings (nickname, email address, etc. if desired). The default download speed is set to MAXIMUM by default, but it is configurable. Use the “skins” option to change the visual aspects of Avarice. Happy hunting!
©2007-2010 • 
01 • greenlant00 Says: 25.02.08 at 8:01 pm
I have been in the Avarice users community since this was once 110100100’s Evil Bottler. This is roughly based on the “Bottler” source code, which was headed in the wrong direction. 110100100 (the coder) has done a very nice job making a simple, slim, fast and reliable IRC/xdcc client. There is also a support forum, but doesn’t get used much, the app runs smooth and responsive.
The biggest key. Make sure to update you servers.ini file. There should be a new file every day. This is located here:
http://avarice.cc/files/servers.ini/servers.ini
02 • sharky Says: 25.02.08 at 10:17 pm
Thanks for the comment! If I recall Bottler forked off in another direction, as well - Blotter. Yes, I joined their forum today and left a post commenting on how much I appreciated the program. And yeah, I admonished the readers to make SURE to update that servers.ini file, as it is about a year old with the install. As a joke, I tried it both ways and ran it with the old server file - if you want connections, you need to update it. Cheers! —Sharky
03 • greenlant00 Says: 25.02.08 at 10:56 pm
This link is a automatically build servers.ini, which I believe runs daily.
http://avarice.cc/files/servers.ini/servers.ini
This is a new addition to the Avarice package. I am able to download this file with both Firefox and IE7. I just replace the servers.ini when I think of it. I have mentioned to the coder to have an option to auto-download the newest servers.ini upon startup.
04 • sharky Says: 25.02.08 at 11:18 pm
Funny thing: In Explorer, when I click on the link, it opens right up and I can save the “servers.ini” file to my hard drive. In Firefox, it just opens the file in the browser as plaintext (so I have to do a ’select all’ and copy/paste to make the file myself from the text in the window). I changed the instructions above - covering it both ways. Thanks for the heads up! —Sharky
05 • 110100100 Says: 26.02.08 at 9:04 pm
Thanks for the amazing review! Your guide to getting started is extremely well written and does an excellent job of explaining how to get up and running in the fewest steps. It could easily serve as the help file that I’ve been meaning to write (for about the last 5 years - I guess you beat me to the punch). I took a peek around the rest of your site and I must say that it is quite a useful resource. Very well done. You raised an interesting point about how big of a hassle it is to get the newest servers.ini. The capability used to exist to download a remote servers.ini, but it was crappy and no one hosted one anyway, as a result the feature was removed. I intent to reimplement the feature as soon as I can. It looks like a new release is on the way. Also, as mentioned in another post on this site, IRCKlipper is no longer around. This has greatly reduced the quality of the daily ini. I hope to improve on the ini spider in the days to come as well. Thank you all again for the terrific review and all of the great comments!
- 110100100
06 • 110100100 Says: 27.02.08 at 3:01 am
Avarice version 1.7 is now available. The biggest new feature is to allow for the use of a remote servers.ini file. Now everyone can easily use the newest servers.ini with no effort whatsoever.
Thanks,
110100100
07 • ruudy Says: 27.02.08 at 11:00 pm
Will anyone please let me know how to join the irc channels in “Avarice”. There is no tab space to write something like /join, /msg …. etc. on the network tab to join fav channels.
08 • ZAxk Says: 28.02.08 at 11:04 am
Just tried this application and downloaded todays server.ini after 20 mminutes of running it says connected to 27 of 136 networks. Is that low a # of networks normal.
09 • sharky Says: 28.02.08 at 1:44 pm
Not sure…when I tried it, I connected to 112 of 136, but that was with a SERVERS.INI file that was a few days older than the one you just got. I’ll try it out again when I get home…
—Sharky
010 • Creamfilling Says: 08.03.08 at 12:30 pm
So uh I dont know how outdated this info is but I copied the stuff off the website (server.ini) and it seemed to be MUCH smaller (29kb) than the one I already had in the folder (192kb or something)
Replace vs dont replace?
011 • sharky Says: 08.03.08 at 2:03 pm
Unsure about the servers.ini file. The one will the “Install” is from March, 2007, but apparently they’re supposed to be updating it on a daily basis now (at the site). Check back to see if there are changes to the file size. The old .INI file definitely didn’t connect to all the servers in the list. If the new one runs at 100% (or close to it) it would still be superior to an INI file that is larger but has many servers that don’t work. Try ‘em both and let us know how it worked.
As a side note, there’s a newer version of Avarice on their site - unsure which INI file it uses, but obviously it’s not the old version.
012 • 110100100 Says: 15.03.08 at 11:01 pm
The newest version of Avarice, by default, uses the daily spidered ini on avarice.cc. It can be configured to any address. The spidered ini has suffered from the demise of ane of the leading XDCC sites, and my lack of extra time. There are also a couple of utilities that allow you to merge several inis together. Good Luck!
013 • 110100100 Says: 15.03.08 at 11:03 pm
@ruudy - Right click on the channel you want to chat in and choose “open in external client”. This will only work if you have a properly configured IRC client already installed. Avarice is NOT a chat client. Not even close.
014 • AH Says: 06.04.08 at 4:24 am
Whats up with only ~200 servers?
015 • znonymous Says: 04.08.08 at 8:59 pm
hey guys, if your having problems getting the server.ini in the right format ‘cuz it keeps opening as text in your internet browser, just let it dowload and display as text, then press VIEW SOURCE. It will open a new text file in the perfect format. Cut and paste THAT into a text file and save it as server.ini and you won’t have to screw with editing it ! Tried in IE and Opera.