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DAL.net adds "Text CAPTCHA" to registration

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

DAL.net Network Logo

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”.

According to the announcement the questions are simple and will be changed weekly – an article in their knowledgebase provides an example of a question that might get used in the registration process:

For example, if the question is “Mark’s name is?”, you would answer:
/NickServ REGISTER mark

The knowledgebase article states that they – for obvious reasons – won’t provide a list with all possible questions and answers but if you should have further questions you’re welcome to /join #DALnetHelp and ask them there.

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A Wiki for all things IRC

IRC-related information can sometimes be hard to come by – with resources either being outdated, unmaintained or due to a lack of interest completely gone offline and forever lost in time.

Wikipedia and other Wikis are a good source for all kinds of information and to a certain extent also for content pertaining IRC – but articles that are to be found today might be gone forever tomorrow due to Wikipedias strict – and sometimes idiotic – notability guidelines.

When an article isn’t considered notable enough it then is put up for deletion and on a special page a discussion is held for and against the deletion of said article. In the event that there is no consensus regarding the deletion, most of the time the article is kept.

However, quite a large number of articles that would have been regarded being notable by the IRC community at large haven’t had much luck and have been deleted from the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” – which has raised many debates if their deletionism is completely out of control or not.

To have a comprehensive source, a few brave folks have set out and created a Wiki that is only for and about IRC-related content, free for anyone to edit and contribute. Since it was only started at the end of March it is still lacking much in content but according to them it already is the “largest IRC dedicated wiki in the world”.

People that want to contribute should take a look at the listing of pages that still need to be completed or improve one of the already existing pages.

We wish IRC-Wiki all the best and hope that many will contribute to it.

What is your experience and opinion on Wikipedias deletionism regarding articles about IRC?

Addendum: Of course, there already are a lot more IRC-related Wikis out there but for once, i’d like to see some collaborative effort -_-

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New Anope stable: 1.8.4

Anope developer chaz announced the immediate availability of a new Anope services release in their stable branch which is now at version 1.8.4.

Anope Logo

Anope Logo

The new release contains a number of “fixes and some further compatibility with InspIRCd 1.2″ but also some new features like tracking of deletes and clearings of XOP access lists and tracking of permanent channels have been introduced.

chaz reveals that there will be some new functionality for their module repository shortly which will “mass build” modules for each new release so prospective users don’t need to rely on the modules author to supply a pre-compiled version of his work.

Furthermore, he announces some of the changes one can look forward in an upcoming 1.9.2 development release which will have a new socket system and finally something that’ll closely resemble live SQL in the form of a “sensible and easy to use commands table which Anope will process at intervals so you can in theory do anything via SQL that you could do from an IRC client”.

In an unusual move, chaz dedicates this release to developer Adam who he says is “not only [...] a development machine but he’s a genuinely nice guy and we’re very grateful for the time and effort he puts into the project” and goes further to commend him to anyone looking for a developer: “If anyone in the real world is looking for a young developer with an incredibly bright future get in touch; he’s definitely worth your time”.

Closing the announcement he writes that “if you are interested in helping / working with us in any way please do get in touch (chaz [at] anope.org), & thank you of course to our sponsors for their selfless kindness” and wishes “Happy Easter to those who celebrate it”.

The downloads can be found here and the full changelog is available here.

Happy Easter from IRC-Junkie to all our readers!

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irssi 0.8.15 has been released

The irssi project just released version 0.8.15 of their commandline IRC client.

This updated version fixes two security issues: a “hard to exploit” remote crash bug and one where the client didn’t check the hostname on SSL connections, so this release is a recommended update.

irssi 0.8.15 Channel View

irssi 0.8.15 Channel View

But besides quite a few bugfixes there are feature additions too: Among others, irssi now shows why a SSL certificate failed validation, paste detection has been improved and quiet-bans (+q) of Charybdis-based IRCds are now displayed in the channel window.

The full changelog can be viewed here and downloads for various Linux distributions as well as sources and links to the SVN repos can be found here.

Thanks for the tip go to Brad!

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mIRC 7.0 Beta is available [Update 8]

Little over two months ago, Khaled Mardam-Bey announced in the mIRC forums that there’ll soon be a public Beta-test of a new version of mIRC.

And just yesterday the Beta of mIRC 7.0 has been made available for download and testing for users that are willing to put up with it being “buggy and crashing often”.

The new version finally has Unicode support which required “tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code” and is the “most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995″.

Due to the rewrites the client “should now be faster, more stable, and more compatible with the latest versions of Windows” – hopefully there haven’t any new bugs been introduced that manage to stay hidden until the Beta goes final and is publicly released.

Aside from now being an Unicode application there have been a number of other feature-additions and bugfixes – including a now persistent channel history, some SSL-related optimizations and improved Windows 7 compatibility; the full changelog comes bundled with mIRC in the download.

Speaking of Windows compatibility – the new version drops the support for dated variants of the OS such as Windows 95, 98 and ME since they can’t natively run Unicode applications and the little Unicode support they have is limited.

mIRC 7.0 Beta Channelview

mIRC 7.0 Beta Channelview

The downside of the Unicode implementation is that “likely that some [existing scripts] will not work correctly” and the only way to know is “to test it out to see whether it behaves as you expect”.

If you decide to test the mIRC 7.0 Beta you’re asked to report any bugs you encounter on their forums – you however should update to the latest Beta and try to reproduce the bug with a clean install of the Beta first.

[Update] The current version is now mIRC 7.01 Beta which fixes a few of the bugs that have been found so far, however it doesn’t appear to be anything major. Download URL remains unchanged.

[Update 2] mIRC Beta Version 7.02 has been released, now checks if it runs in a WINE environment - 15 WINE-specific changes have been made, features known not to work are disabled under WINE. Other miscellaneous fixes include DCC and DDE message handling.

[Update 3] mIRC Beta 7.03 was released, adds miscellaneous fixes regarding DCC send/get dialogues, some .ini handling errors have been resolved and riched20.dll is now used for the richedit editbox again as it seems to be “faster and more reliable overall”. The /fseek command has had some line-matching bugs fixed as well as optimizations for BOM-checking in file routines which should only have minimal impact on read & write performance now. mIRC also gained a feature that prevents long lines from being cut off which are now sent as multiple lines instead if the feature is turned on.

[Update 4] mIRC Beta 7.04 is out and besides a small set of bugfixes and optimizations it adds UPnP support which enables simple and automated port forwardings on compatible routers – the feature works for DCC, identd and retrieval of your external IP address.

mIRC 7.04 Beta UPnP Options

mIRC 7.04 Beta UPnP Options

[Update 5] mIRC 7.05 Beta is available for download and extends the editbox history and the /sockread function to 100 lines and 4096 bytes respectively.  Changes to the INI routines include quoting for non-printable characters, comments in topics are now saved properly and a bug that resulted in “random crashes” has been eradicated. For the rest of the fixes see the file versions.txt that comes with the download.

[Update 6] mIRC Beta 7.06 is out and updates OpenSSL to 0.9.8o, fixes a generic protection fault and comes with full screen support whose state is remembered across client restarts. CAP event handling has been changed to prevent scripts from suppressing CAP replies and the “Find Text” dialog now returns results from wrapped lines too.

[Update 7] The beta has been updated again and is now at version 7.07. Bugfixes in this release include a fix that resolves a crash in fullscreen-mode when “many windows are open”.

[Update 8] In a neverending stream of updates, mIRC 7.08 Beta has just been released. A bug that could corrupt logfiles was fixed as well as a bug concerning unicode surrogates. The small number of bugfixes in this update (5, compared to 12 each in the last 2 updates) could be an indicator that mIRC 7 is getting closer to a final state.


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