If You Use The Mibbit Chat Widget…

If you use the Mibbit chat widget on your site, please ensure that server messages are visible to users. Having it disabled makes it so the server and services messages to the user are not displayed, and this can cause confusion (e.g. when the user is using a registered nick and all of a sudden their nick is changed and they don’t know why, when they are trying to change their nickserv settings and see no feedback from services, etc.)

To enable the server messages, look at the embed URL that you are using. If you see noServerNotices=1, you should either set it to 0 or remove it entirely.

Thanks to MikeWard1701 for bringing this to our attention.

GeekShed Embed v2

EDIT: This post is about a WordPress plugin that has been written. It is NOT about the TFlash client itself. No updates for the TFlash client are planned at this time.

About six months ago, I (Ryan (ninja in #help)) created GeekShed Embed, a WordPress plugin so that GeekShed users that use WordPress to power their website could easily embed a GeekShed chat room into their site. At the time, I promised that there would be updates; however, I did not have time until recently to do anything with it.

Most of what I wanted to add has been already added to it, but I wanted to ask the community and see if there was anything that you can think of that should be included, or if there were any bugs that you have run into.

So if you have a suggestion for what should be included in the update, or have run into a bug, please leave a comment here with details. Assuming it’s nothing too far-fetched, I should be able to include it in the update.

Note: if you have run into a bug and are reporting it, please include the WordPress version you are running, and whether it is WordPress MU/MS or a regular WordPress installation.

Does GeekShed spy on channels or private messages?

In short, no. We value your privacy and, as a company, we do not store any logs of any conversations, private or otherwise. There are a few exceptions which I shall explain below:

  • All network staff log the channels that they are in and the private messages that they receive. These logs are typically for the sole reference of that staff member but may be shared with parties who have sufficient jurisdiction to obtain them, if required. We may also call upon users to voluntarily provide logs of channels or private messages, if required.
  • GeekShed operates a spam filter to help keep the network safe from spam. When the spam filter is triggered, the user who triggered it is always notified. In addition to this, network staff are notified of the violation and are provided with the full message that triggered the spam filter. This helps us to identify sources of spam and quickly remove these from the network.
  • Very rarely we are forced to run our services package in debug mode on the live network in order to diagnose and fix problems with it. This causes all messages seen by services bots to be placed in a debug log. Messages that are logged are private messages to services (e.g. identification to NickServ) and channel messages in any channel with a BotServ bot assigned. We will always notify you when services are going into debug mode.
  • All unauthorised messages to OperServ are logged. This is mostly so we can help users who might be looking for another command as there’s very little reason to attempt to use OperServ, except in error.
  • All messages sent through services bots with “/bs say” or “/bs act” are logged. This is the default behavior of our services package but is something that we are looking to change soon.

Posts such as “ADVISORY: How to tell if your Unrealircd network is spying on you” found here are simply ignorant scaremongering. GeekShed has modules which hook into channel and private messages – for example, we have a module to block private messages when umode D is set. These modules are all in the interest of our user’s security and suggesting that hooking into channel and private messages inherently means that a network spys on its users is just silly.

You can see the full and current source code for our ircd at http://code.google.com/p/gs-ircd/.

If you have any questions or issues, feel free to come and chat to us in #help.

New Swedish Server – Greenbean

Kottizen, a new user to GeekShed but a long time member of the Anope and UnrealIRCD support communities has kindly donated a server on behalf of the datacentre he works for, connect2ip.se. The server is located in Växjö, Sweden and adds another great European leaf to the GeekShed network.

We thank Kottizen for the donation of Greenbean and hope it shall benefit our European users.

Guess who’s back? Back again!

Kyle previously joined the GeekShed staff back in late 2009 (original post) but he left to pursue other life interests. He has, though, realised that GeekShed is a pretty fantabulous place to be and is back with avengence.

We’re pleased to have such an experienced and friendly staff member back on the team.