IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

GeekShed, the “free to use and family-friendly Internet Relay Chat network”, is currently suffering from a large scale DDoS attack that cripples their infrastructure consisting of 15 servers.

Even though those servers are in datacentres that offer DDoS-protection and are hosted with a number of large backbones they cannot seem to withstand the sheer volume of ICMP and UDP traffic directed at them.

Some of the servers have been null-routed by the hosting providers, others have been null-routed by GeekShed staff to “prevent damage to other machines and customers” according to network owner Phil.

DAL.net adds – and is probably the first network to do this – a “text CAPTCHA” to its nick-registration process.

DAL.net Network Logo

Their news announcement says that they want to ensure that a nickname and a channel should always be able to be registered first by a human and not a bot.

They do that in response to a trend they noticed where they reportedly have “seen increases in bots getting nicks and channels, holding them, and never releasing them” and continue to say that it’s “not fair to the average person that a botnet gets a nickname before a human does”.

Today, we’re proud to present you an interview conducted with QuakeNets Head of Public Relations Joe “meeb” Harris.

QuakeNet is the worlds largest IRC network and caters mostly – but not exclusively – to gamers.

Without further ado, below are the questions and answers:

First, please introduce yourselves to our readers!

When you started your own network this is probably the first question that came to your mind the second after everything was up and running – “Now, how do i get a few more users in here?”.

With over 5000 IRC networks in existence, chances are slim to none that someone actually stumbles over your network and sets up the channel for his users on it.

But fret not, in this post we’ll outline a few ways to attract users to your network and also talk about a few do’s and don’ts when promoting it – read on.

The KVIrc team has issued an update of their IRC client although it’s technically still at RC2.

The update is recommended for all users of the freenode IRC network that experience problems with “Excess Flood” disconnects from the network, mostly due to autojoining a large number of channels where the client automatically issues a series of commands (/WHO, gets channelmodes and lists of bans as well as ban and invite exemptions) – neither of those events have been rate-limited in the past.