IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

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”.

After more than 2 years of silence the DALnet Coding Team released a new version of Bahamut, an IRCd mainly used on DAL.net.

First being released as version 1.8.5 there was a bugfix-release shortly thereafter as a bug has been found in channelmode +c which sometimes not only prevented control-characters as bold and underlined being sent but also stripped legitimate messages that contained certain arabic and hebrew characters.

We took the time to ask Epiphani – the Coding Teams Team-Leader – a few question about his IRCd and the history of it:

“We’ve just disbanded the DALnet testnet team and integrated all of the application evaluation functions into the routing team as they were before. This is a step to streamline the application process and adapt to current needs and change in workload” DALnet’s Ahnberg announced yesterday on the DALnet mailinglist.

Recently, DALnet decided to AKILL all customers from FDCservers, a co-location company quite a few shell providers have their server located at.

Ahnberg, admin at DALnet, explained to IRC-Junkie in a reaction; “I’ve heard that the abuse from them over the years has been extremely large, and that the staff working with this and the chaos their users and subcompanies (shellproviders renting rackspace, I guess) cause to our network. It is a very bothersome and time-straining thing to have to handle for our colleagues.”

Since a few days channel managers of XXX password channels on DALnet have been directed to read this page. “You have been directed to this page because you are listed as founder on a channel which has been reported to us as a location where passwords for adult sites are traded”, the page starts.