MOTD for channels

Is there a way to display a file/string of text to a user's channel output when a user joins a channel? Would this 开发者_开发百科have to happen serverside in the irc config or could a bot do the same?

A bot could do it. Many servers, such as Freenode, support sending notices via the server's services to users upon joining a channel.

Either way you let a bot react on a join event and send a message (/msg) or a notice (/notice) to the user. Or you let the server send an entry message if the server supports this service. Most common you do this with "/chanserv set entrymsg my_message".