In order to advertise the existence of the compromised site, the IRC software would join public IRC "warez" channels as a "bot" and post into the channel with occasional status messages every few minutes, providing information about how many people are logged into the warez host, how many files are currently being downloaded, what the upload/download ratio is (to force users into contributing data of their own before they can download), which warez distributor is running the bot, and other status information.