IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Today we shall have a look at the various possibilities available for statistics of activity on IRC, should you decide you want to have some pretty graphs detailing the happenings in a channel or on a whole network.

Most programs presented in this article parse logfiles generated by a variety of IRC clients, with the exception of phpDenora/Denora which needs to be run as a network service to gather its stats. However, both solutions can supplement one another as one may gather and display information that the other does or even can not.

The Denora project releases 1.4.0 of phpDenora which is according to Hal9000 mainly a bugfix release “with some changes to the core like utf-8 support”.

Now if you are wondering why there is nothing really new to see in this release, the explanation simply is that phpDenora2 is on the way and it would be a waste of time to dedicate any energy in making substantial changes to phpDenora 1.x. And fear not, an alpha preview release will be available sometime next month.

The changes that have been introduced “require Denora 1.4 and PHP 5.2.” and Hal9000 urges to “read the new System Requirements and the upgrade instructions carefully on the download page.”

After getting notified about a Cross-site scripting vulnerability in phpDenora irc-junkie quickly tried to get in touch with the project.

The vulnerability – which generally can be used to steal cookies – exists at least in phpDenoras then latest stable release, version 1.2.2 and “possibly all other versions” says developer Hal9000.

Due to lacking sanitization it was possible to exploit the vulnerability using specially crafted channelnames that would be visible on several pages of phpDenora – according to phpDenoras Hal9000 on the “channel listing, the channel stats page, the user stats page and the top channel list on the homepage – if the channel is in the top X channels”.

Changes in the latest version include improved Charybdis support, Nefarious and other P10 IRCD improvements, compiling on Windows has been fixed, some other minor fixes which are unnamed and an as vaguely described “potential security issue in string handling has been adressed”.

Compiling on Windows with SQL enabled has been a “last minute fix” so the developers consider this a test release for Windows and appreciate any feedback via their bugtracker

The homepage of the project is located here

“Yes. Oh, yes… It’s there,” the Denora website announced. “Over two years and 9 months after the last stable release, we now finally set the next major version in the wild: Denora 1.4.0! There have been hundreds of changes, improvements and fixes. We believe Denora 1.4 will bring you a more reliable and satisfying experience.”