I am writing an IRC bot in Python using the Twisted library. To test my bot I need to connect several times to an IRC network as my bot requires a restart each time a change is made. Therefore I am often "banned" from these networks for a couple of minutes because I have made a lot of connections.
This makes it annoying testing and writing the bot. Does anyone know of a better way to test the bot or any network which isn't as restrict with the amount of connections as QuakeNet is?
freenode is good..  You can create channels for yourself to test.  Also check out this project called supybot, which is good for Python bots.
Testing an IRC bot