IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

GameSurge, a network that is mainly catering to gamers, is celebrating its 6th birthday on the 3rd of February.

In the announcement on their homepage they write that they are “pleased to announce that on February 3, 2010, we will be celebrating our 6th birthday” and that the “continuous success of this network is all in part due to you, our loyal user base. To show our deep appreciation for your support, we will be giving away numerous prizes to lucky, random users on Friday, February 5, 2010 6PM Pacific time.”

The GameSurge network turns 5 years today as admin pb announces on their homepage.

But, as they write in the announcement “unlike your birthday (we hope, anyway), instead of you giving US presents, well, we’re giving YOU some!”.

He continues to write that they will have “a little party on IRC in #5thAnniversary” and that they’re “doing random giveaways”. Those will consist of “a ton of Left4Dead swag or some RazerZone gear” and he says that you “can’t go wrong no matter what”.

Their contest page has a little more information about the upcoming and planned events:

Over the past month GameSurge (ranked #9 by SearchIRC.com) have started to actively recruit new support staff. IRC-Junkie finds out what it takes to become an active member on this network.

The end of January the network posted an article on their website requesting people from European timezones to apply for support staff member. Last week a second request went out for all timezones.

“We originally requested only European applicants because were having problems supporting our userbase from those time zones”, Human Resources Manager Michael Rossi explained to IRC-Junkie. ” We received a decent response from the Europeans. We hired 10 European staff members.  After we hired them, however, we realized at that point that we could also use some more help in our American time zones.”

“To further the goal of encouraging good security habits, GameSurge has teamed up with Panda Software to host the GameSurge/Panda Software Security Giveaway”, the GameSurge website announced.

Alacard2k (IRC Operator and Support Operator) explained to IRC-Junkie that originally it was Panda Software that contacted the network for advertising possibilities on their website. “As a general rule we don’t place advertisements on our website, so I spoke to them about some alternatives. Eventually we settled on an idea that would be beneficial to everyone, a giveaway.”

“At approximately 5pm PST today all BellSouth hosts were blocked due to inaction by their abuse department. We are currently working with BellSouth support to resolve this issue. Once BellSouth addresses our abuse complaints with them, we will remove the block on BellSouth hosts”, GameSurge admin Cradly announced on the networks’ website.

Major IRC networks are occasionally forced to GLine an entire ISP due to inactivity after abuse reports. This time however, it was a single user. “… it was an actual user who would persistently evade bans and G-lines” another GameSurge admin, Entrope, explained to IRC-Junkie.