GeekShed IRC Network
New Staff Member -tengrrl
Jul 2nd
We would like to announce the addition of a new staff member to our team.
Today, we have asked tengrrl to join our network staff, and she has gratefully accepted. We are very lucky to have another experienced person on the team.
There is a lot to learn, and we are confident she will master this with time. Please welcome tengrrl to our staff and congratulate her on her new position.
Today, we have asked tengrrl to join our network staff, and she has gratefully accepted. We are very lucky to have another experienced person on the team.
There is a lot to learn, and we are confident she will master this with time. Please welcome tengrrl to our staff and congratulate her on her new position.
The past 8 months
Jun 21st
GeekShed is now near enough 8 months old. Those of you who have been with us from the start may remember the document outlining why the majority of the staff and servers were splitting away from WyldRyde and starting a-fresh on GeekShed. Those of you who don’t remember can find the document in PDF format. Since that happened, an awful lot has gone on. GeekShed has grown by nearly 50% and is still growing. We have recently surpassed the peak user count that we saw when we were part of WyldRyde. The SearchIRC graphs below show this:
The above user counts include network bots – WyldRyde has approx 125 and GeekShed 110. GeekShed is currently (at time of writing) ranked the 60th biggest IRC network of 1,012 listed on SearchIRC. This is great!
Our Twitter channel has also been a great success. We have tweeted as regularly as we can – updating you on what’s new with GeekShed and how we’re getting along. We have recently passed the WyldRyde twitter channel in number of followers and we get approximately 70 mentions in an average week. The majority of these are positive, and we have tried to help, the best we can, those people who are posting negative messages due to encountering problems.
Our new YouTube channel is also doing great. We have a decent number of subscribers and are always gaining more. What we really need is for users to make videos that they think might help other users such that we can add more useful information to the channel. Most of the GeekShed staff use mIRC, and any client tutorials that can be made by users of other clients would be most appreciated. Come see us in #help if you have an idea.
We have also recently become directly involved in the development of our services package, Anope. We have worked with the Anope development team and committed bug fixes and new features to the 1.8 (stable) branch to help improve our services and help the wider Anope community. A number of new services modules have also been developed to make your experience better. These include the channel ban appeal module and associated web page, a module to automatically identify you if you ghost or recover a nickname, and a few other modules to increase the security and reliability of services.
We have implemented a BNC service and associated web management panel to provide bouncers designed for users who cannot always stay connected to GeekShed but would like to keep track of channel and private messages whilst they’re disconnected. This service also helps those users who have multiple computers, for example home and work computers as well as a laptop, and would like to connect to their IRC session from any location.
Updates and improvements have been made to the inherently badly written code of UnrealIRCD to make GeekShed’s IRCD more reliable and less resource intensive. Although unavoidable netsplits still occur, we have seen a decrease in buggy and crashy IRCD processes.
We have, by creating an Anope->XML database converter, allowed the site to interact with services. This has allowed us to provide private access areas of the site, such as QDB submissions, accessed using your services login. Integration with our services servers has also allowed us to provide things such as channel and user lists, user statistics and an automatically updating list of bots.
Your generosity has been astounding and we have received an amazing sum of money in donations over the past 8 months. This has enabled us to register as a company, renew the domains and privacy protection for the next 4 years, secure our services login with SSL, obtain attack resistent servers to help rid us of proxies and bots and, most importantly, redesign TFlash. TFlash’s redesign has allowed us to add a load of new features and make it generally easier for you to use and embed into your own site. We know adverts were a major point of dislike for our users when we were part of WyldRyde and your generosity has allowed us to make all of our services totally advert free. All of the staff are volunteers dedicated to making GeekShed a better place for users. Its intent has never been to make money and each and we are extremely grateful for every donation made.
The staff team has been refreshed. Those staff who are no longer active or have expressed that they do not have time for GeekShed have been removed and replaced with new staff members who have more time to spare. We feel that constantly injecting fresh blood into the staff team will help the network develop as new ideas are brought in. Every staff member has worked extremely hard and we are very thankful for all of their efforts.
Our server turnover has been remarkably high. Although we would like a low server turnover, this hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. We have constantly been adding new servers and removing those which have not performed as expected. We are currently in a state where every server we have has proved to be reliable.
The GeekShed forums are doing well and it has been proved that free software works better than the paid software that was used on WyldRyde at the time of the split. We do not feel that it is necessary to waste donor’s money on unnecessary things.
Our terms of service have been developed over time to strike the best balance we can between network security, user safety, and freedom of action. We feel that they are currently in a state which balances these aspects effectively.
A lot has happened over the past 8 months. None of it could have been possible without the continued support of our users and staff – we are truly thankful to each one of you for sticking by us. Much is planned for the future and we urge you to continue to use our services and encourage your friends to do so also.
Many thanks
The GeekShed Staff
The above user counts include network bots – WyldRyde has approx 125 and GeekShed 110. GeekShed is currently (at time of writing) ranked the 60th biggest IRC network of 1,012 listed on SearchIRC. This is great!
Our Twitter channel has also been a great success. We have tweeted as regularly as we can – updating you on what’s new with GeekShed and how we’re getting along. We have recently passed the WyldRyde twitter channel in number of followers and we get approximately 70 mentions in an average week. The majority of these are positive, and we have tried to help, the best we can, those people who are posting negative messages due to encountering problems.
Our new YouTube channel is also doing great. We have a decent number of subscribers and are always gaining more. What we really need is for users to make videos that they think might help other users such that we can add more useful information to the channel. Most of the GeekShed staff use mIRC, and any client tutorials that can be made by users of other clients would be most appreciated. Come see us in #help if you have an idea.
We have also recently become directly involved in the development of our services package, Anope. We have worked with the Anope development team and committed bug fixes and new features to the 1.8 (stable) branch to help improve our services and help the wider Anope community. A number of new services modules have also been developed to make your experience better. These include the channel ban appeal module and associated web page, a module to automatically identify you if you ghost or recover a nickname, and a few other modules to increase the security and reliability of services.
We have implemented a BNC service and associated web management panel to provide bouncers designed for users who cannot always stay connected to GeekShed but would like to keep track of channel and private messages whilst they’re disconnected. This service also helps those users who have multiple computers, for example home and work computers as well as a laptop, and would like to connect to their IRC session from any location.
Updates and improvements have been made to the inherently badly written code of UnrealIRCD to make GeekShed’s IRCD more reliable and less resource intensive. Although unavoidable netsplits still occur, we have seen a decrease in buggy and crashy IRCD processes.
We have, by creating an Anope->XML database converter, allowed the site to interact with services. This has allowed us to provide private access areas of the site, such as QDB submissions, accessed using your services login. Integration with our services servers has also allowed us to provide things such as channel and user lists, user statistics and an automatically updating list of bots.
Your generosity has been astounding and we have received an amazing sum of money in donations over the past 8 months. This has enabled us to register as a company, renew the domains and privacy protection for the next 4 years, secure our services login with SSL, obtain attack resistent servers to help rid us of proxies and bots and, most importantly, redesign TFlash. TFlash’s redesign has allowed us to add a load of new features and make it generally easier for you to use and embed into your own site. We know adverts were a major point of dislike for our users when we were part of WyldRyde and your generosity has allowed us to make all of our services totally advert free. All of the staff are volunteers dedicated to making GeekShed a better place for users. Its intent has never been to make money and each and we are extremely grateful for every donation made.
The staff team has been refreshed. Those staff who are no longer active or have expressed that they do not have time for GeekShed have been removed and replaced with new staff members who have more time to spare. We feel that constantly injecting fresh blood into the staff team will help the network develop as new ideas are brought in. Every staff member has worked extremely hard and we are very thankful for all of their efforts.
Our server turnover has been remarkably high. Although we would like a low server turnover, this hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. We have constantly been adding new servers and removing those which have not performed as expected. We are currently in a state where every server we have has proved to be reliable.
The GeekShed forums are doing well and it has been proved that free software works better than the paid software that was used on WyldRyde at the time of the split. We do not feel that it is necessary to waste donor’s money on unnecessary things.
Our terms of service have been developed over time to strike the best balance we can between network security, user safety, and freedom of action. We feel that they are currently in a state which balances these aspects effectively.
A lot has happened over the past 8 months. None of it could have been possible without the continued support of our users and staff – we are truly thankful to each one of you for sticking by us. Much is planned for the future and we urge you to continue to use our services and encourage your friends to do so also.
Many thanks
The GeekShed Staff
Getting information about channel user counts
Jun 2nd
We have implemented a feature which tracks the number of users in GeekShed channels. This information can then be used to give you information such as average user counts over different time periods. Although we have not fully decided what to do with this data, the basis of the system can be found at http://www.geekshed.net/usercount/. If you have any suggestions as to what we can do with the data, let us know in #help.
How to block specific phrases from your channel
May 31st
GeekShed maintains a list of words which will be censored when chmode +G is set and also a spamfilter of URLs or phrases that are blocked network wide. You can block or censor certain phrases in your own channel regardless of whether or not you have chmode +G set. To do this, you can use the extended ban type ~T. The format of this is:
If you have any questions, come see us in #help.
/mode #channel +b ~T:Action can either be ‘block’ or ‘censor’. ‘block’ will stop any line containing ‘text’ from being sent to users of the channel and ‘censor’ will replace the banned phrase with ‘<censored>’. Text can also be a wildcard string (i.e. * matches anything). For example, sugar* would match ‘sugar’, ‘sugarpuffs’, ‘sugarstuff’, etc. Example usages of this command are::
/mode #channel +b ~T:block:sugarThe result of this is:
(20:26:15)sugar #foo Message blocked due to a text ban (#foo)
/mode #channel +b ~T:censor:sugar*The result of this is:
(20:27:31)Because of the way IRC works, as with chmode +G, the person saying the censored word will not see it as censored on their client however every other channel user will.I love <censored>
If you have any questions, come see us in #help.
GeekShed’s YouTube Channel
May 30th
GeekShed has a YouTube channel where we post videos created by staff and users relating to various aspects of GeekShed. Many of these will show you, in the form of a screen video, how to perform certain tasks and make your IRC experience better. This can be found at http://www.youtube.com/GeekShedIRC. Here are a list of the videos in our YouTube channel:
 |
Video on installing mIRC and using it to connect to GeekShed and join your favorite channels – by Phil. |
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
219
 2
ratings |
| Time: 06:14 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
Tutorial by Phil on loading new scripts into mIRC |
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
123
 2
ratings |
| Time: 01:45 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
Tutorial on connecting to the GeekShed BNC service with XChat by edgy |
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
182
2
ratings |
| Time: 00:33 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
|
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
90
4
ratings |
| Time: 00:56 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
|
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
81
1
ratings |
| Time: 00:30 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
Video on connecting to the GeekShed BNC service by edgy. |
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
71
0
ratings |
| Time: 00:26 | More in Science & Technology |
 |
Video presented by Phil on getting a GeekShed BNC and connecting to it with mIRC |
From:
GeekShedIRC
Views:
252
5
ratings |
| Time: 04:46 | More in Science & Technology |
BNC Service
May 24th
GeekShed has today launched a free BNC service for users to use for connecting to the network. Find out all about it and get your BNC at http://www.geekshed.net/bnc/
Loss of a dear friend
May 16th
It is with great regret that I write to report the passing of a friend of many years. Jennifer Nicole Noles, IRC nicknames sin and nic, died this morning in Vegas. She suffered from Endometriosis. Nic has been a user on GeekShed and it’s predecessor for over 7 years and, in that time, has touched many people with her loving and dynamic personality.
Nic is a great friend to many and will be sorely missed. May she rest in peace. – Update If you wish to chat with others about this, stop in #naughtycloset
Nic is a great friend to many and will be sorely missed. May she rest in peace. – Update If you wish to chat with others about this, stop in #naughtycloset
Redirecting one channel to another
May 13th
If you have changed the name of your channel or would like to merge a few channels into one, you can use ChanServ to create a redirect from your old channel to your new channel. To do this, use the following command:
There are various restrictions on this command. These are as follows:
The following restrictions apply to active redirects:
This can be used with the ChanServ MIGRATE command to move all of your settings from one channel to another. Example use of this is:
/cs redirect #oldchannel #newchannel
There are various restrictions on this command. These are as follows:
- You must be the real founder of #oldchannel
- You must be a founder of #newchannel
- You cannot create loops or chains by redirecting a channel to one which is already a redirect
- Once the command is done, you cannot undo it! This must be done by a services admin
The following restrictions apply to active redirects:
- A redirected channel will be dropped 60 days after you set the redirect
- You can change the channel the redirect points to but this will not reset the 60 day expiry time
- If the new channel is +L users will not be redirected. This is to stop chaining and looping
- The redirect will walk any keys (+k) you have on the new channel. This means you can redirect a keyed channel to another keyed channel
- The redirect will not walk any other channel mode restrictions (+l, +O, +A, +R, +b, +I, +z). If any of those modes are set, the user will have to conform with their requirements to be successfully redirected
This can be used with the ChanServ MIGRATE command to move all of your settings from one channel to another. Example use of this is:
/cs migrate #oldchannel #newchannel
E-Mail Validation
May 5th
After recent BotNet attacks on GeekShed and other IRC networks, lessons have been learned and measures have been put in place to mitigate the effects of future attacks. One such mitigation method is validation of e-mail addresses. When you register a new nickname in the future, you will be sent an e-mail to ensure that it is correct. This e-mail will contain all the instructions you need to activate the nickname.
Note that this does not apply to grouped nicknames and most users will not require more than 1 nickname group. See http://www.geekshed.net/grouping for help with grouping.
Any questions, ask in #help.
Denial of Service
Apr 26th
As I write this, GeekShed is suffering a large scale Denial of Service attack. It is expected that the attack is the result of a user being banned in the channel owned by Chris Pirillo. Following this ban, much flooding ensued. After this was quashed by #chris ops, a botnet was set on GeekShed. This was a relatively admirable botnet however it was fairly easily quashed by network staff.
Most of the servers that make up GeekShed are currently being bombarded with large volumes of ICMP and UDP traffic. Despite them being in data centres with large backbones and DDOS protection, they cannot withstand the volume of traffic being thrown at them and have buckled. Many of the servers have had to be null routed to prevent damage to other machines and customers. This is the second attack GeekShed has suffered as a result of someone being disgruntled at Chris Pirillo. Sadly, as Chris is currently now tucked up in bed and only offers the channel as a means for people to discuss tech related issues, this doesn’t affect him.
The people who are affected are the network staff who give their time and money to keep GeekShed running. The same network staff who donate their own servers for the good of GeekShed. The same network staff who are dragged out of bed at 4am to watch as their business sites crumble as a result of a misplaced attack.
It saddens me that someone would launch such an attack against a network of volunteers with such little cause. We must now sit out this attack and hope that the perpetrator realises the error of their ways or finds a more worthwhile place to attack. Until this time, service will be intermittent.
Most of the servers that make up GeekShed are currently being bombarded with large volumes of ICMP and UDP traffic. Despite them being in data centres with large backbones and DDOS protection, they cannot withstand the volume of traffic being thrown at them and have buckled. Many of the servers have had to be null routed to prevent damage to other machines and customers. This is the second attack GeekShed has suffered as a result of someone being disgruntled at Chris Pirillo. Sadly, as Chris is currently now tucked up in bed and only offers the channel as a means for people to discuss tech related issues, this doesn’t affect him.
The people who are affected are the network staff who give their time and money to keep GeekShed running. The same network staff who donate their own servers for the good of GeekShed. The same network staff who are dragged out of bed at 4am to watch as their business sites crumble as a result of a misplaced attack.
It saddens me that someone would launch such an attack against a network of volunteers with such little cause. We must now sit out this attack and hope that the perpetrator realises the error of their ways or finds a more worthwhile place to attack. Until this time, service will be intermittent.
