GeekShed IRC

Grouping a Nick: Why and How?

Ryan — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:03:18 +0000

So you’ve registered your nick, but have more than one computer/device that you join IRC from. You might be wondering “do I need to register a new nick and have people add that nick to access lists as well? Certainly there must be an easier way.”

Well luckily for you, there is. You are able to group nicks together so that permissions and other data are shared among accounts. Some of the items that are shared include (but are not limited to): channel ownership, permission levels (owner, halfop, etc.) on channels, group info that was provided when you registered, password, and virtual host. Pretty much anything your single nick has associated with it will be associated with the group of nicks that you have registered.

Here’s how to group a nick to one that you already have registered:

Switch to the nick that you want to group
- NOTE 1: Before you enter the next command, make sure that you are using the nick you want to add to your existing group. Do NOT be using your main nick. Example: if I wanted to group JayneCobb to my account, I would /nick JayneCobb.
- NOTE 2: If you use a registered nick when the next step if performed, it will first be dropped, then grouped to the main nick. Example: if I try to group JayneCobb (which is registered) to my main nick MalcolmReynolds, Services will first drop JayneCobb, then have it join the MalcolmReynolds group. By being dropped, any permissions JayneCobb had will be gone.
Enter the following command in the server/status window: /msg nickserv group main_nick password, where main_nick is your primary nick, and password is the password belonging to the primary nick.
Example: I want to group JayneCobb to my primary nick, MalcolmReynolds, and the password for it is S3reni+yV@ll3y (you do use something secure for your passwords, right?). I would type the following as JayneCobb: /msg nickserv group MalcolmReynolds S3reni+yV@ll3y
Look for nickserv to either tell you that you have joined the group of your primay nick or give you an error message, such as “you must wait at least 60 seconds before using the group command again”.

And just to give you the commands again, they are, in order:

/nick theNewNick

/msg nickserv group main_nick password

Now what if you want to delink a nick, i.e. remove it from the group, is there some way to do that? Yes there is, you just drop it by switching to the nick, and doing /msg nickserv drop. Doing that will make nickserv completely drop the nick – it will no longer exist, have any permissions, etc.

Is there someway to delink it without dropping, or without it losing the permissions and other information? Not currently, although I suppose it is possible that it could end up in a future version of anope, or someone could create a module that could drop a nick and register it using the credentials of the former group and preserving permissions, etc.

Should you have any questions about grouping nicks, feel free to leave a comment here, or to join #help and ask in there.

Can I Link Two Channels?

Ryan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:23:12 +0000

One question that is routinely asked in #help is how a channel owner can forward users from one channel to another. They usually ask this because they have changed channel names, and there is no other method available to regular users (as opposed to those with access to the IRCd configuration files); however it is also useful if the group that the channel is used by is hosting an event, and to keep the main channel manageable, want to limit it to only X amount of people, and have users that join after that go to an overfill channel.

In any case, linking two channels together is very easy, as it only involves setting two channel modes – the first sets a limit of X people that can be in the channel, and the second sets the channel to send people to after X people have joined the main channel. Also, you are not limited in the number of channels that can be linked together, with the exception that a channel can only forward users to one channel. #Chan1 can forward to #chan2, which can forward to #chan3, etc.

l = Channel may hold at most of users [o] (This mode is a lowercase L, not a capital i)
L = Channel link (If +l is full, the next user will auto-join ) [q]

So if I wanted to forward my channel #Inara to #Adria, I would do the following: /mode #Inara +lL 1 #Adria. If I wanted to always have the channel set like that, so that nobody could change it, I would use chanserv’s mlock option, and do: /msg chanserv set #Inara mlock +lL 1 #Adria.

If you are linking an old channel to a new one (i.e. you’ve moved channels), the number must be 1, and there must be someone in the channel for it to work (note: botserv bots do not count. It can be a bot that you run though). If you have linked a primary channel to an overfill one, the number can be anything equal to or greater than 1.

NOTE: Linked channels do not share the same permissions, you will need to add people to the aop/sop/hop/vop lists in each channel.

Should you have any questions about linking channels, feel free to leave a comment here, or to join #help and ask in there.

What Do YOU Want To See?

Ryan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:00:32 +0000

My week long break from courses is coming up soon, and I have nothing to do for it. So I figured that I would put a day or two towards GeekShed. The only problem is that I don’t know what I should do. This is where you, the users, come into play. Although we always welcome input from our users, whether it’s a comment left here, on the forums, in #help, on twitter, or directly to a staffer, the whole purpose of this post is to solicit ideas on what you would like to see.

Here are the ground rules:

It should have something to do with the website, especially the parts that are driven by WordPress (basically everything except the forums), as that is my primary area of responsibility.
It should be something that can be done in 12-24 hours. My break is only a week long, and as much as I love GeekShed, I don’t want to undertake something that will take the entire break.
It should be something that will benefit the majority of users (i.e. not a post about why people should join your channel).
Obviously, the suggestion must conform to the Network’s Terms of Use.

If there is more than one suggestion, I will probably work on the most popular one, so talk with your friends about it and have them comment too. Don’t let this discourage you from suggesting something though – all suggestions will remain here, as well as the spreadsheet I will be compiling with them. Something that isn’t done now may be worked on at a later point in time.

I will be leaving comments on this post open for a week, at which point I’ll close them and decide which item I will be working on.

If you have any questions or need something clarified, please /join #help and speak with Ryan, or you may post in this topic on the forum. Please leave comments here for suggestions only.

How Do I Embed My Chatroom Onto My Website?

Ryan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:07:39 +0000

One of the more frequent questions we see is people wondering how do they embed their chatroom on their website, and more often than not, it’s run off of WordPress. Although I wrote this while going through the steps on a site using WordPress, the process should be similar on Drupal, Joomla, or any other CMS.

One thing to note before starting is that you need to be able to post HTML, and not have it filtered. If you are using wordpress.com, or WPMU and are not the site/super admin, your HTML is filtered and you will not be able to see the chat box when you post the post/page you’re trying to put it onto. If you cannot post HTML, it will not work because it will treat the code as text instead.

Having said that, here are 5 easy steps to embedding your chat onto a site.

Get the embed code from our website. At the very minimum, you should change the channel name. Unless you know better dimensions for your site’s layout, it might be best to leave the default size; you can always change that later (it is just two variables in the embed code).
Add a new Page or Post like you normally would, and give it a title. While still in the visual editor (if you use it), feel free to add anything that you would like above and/or below the chat box and associated items.
Next, if you aren’t already in HTML mode, click on the HTML button.
Paste in the code you copied from step 1 in the appropriate place (depending on if you added text for above/below [step 2]). At this point, you will see the code, which may not make sense to you. Click the Save Draft button, then Preview.
Depending on your theme, you might need to change the size of the chat. Once you are happy with how it looks, Publish the post.

Still have questions? Feel free to ask in #help, or post in the forums

New Staff Member – CCMike

Phil — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:34:10 +0000

There is a concept. This concept is difficult for the author to understand. Some people call it ‘real life’. Sadly, this mischievous beast has gotten in the way once more and our newest staff member, Kyle, has been forced to resign his staff position to pursue further education. This is a great loss to GeekShed and we wish him all the best with his studies.

In an attempt to fill the gaping hole left by Kyle’s resignation, we have asked CCMike to join the GeekShed staff team. He kindly accepted this offer and we are thrilled to have him on the team. CCMike has been on GeekShed and its predecessor for 5+ years and is a great friend to many.

Like any new staff member, Mike has a lot to learn but we are confident that he will take this in his stride.

Can People on GeekShed See My IP Address

Ryan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:24:49 +0000

Every now and then, a question that arises in #help is if people can see the IP address of another individual. Since GeekShed encrypt users’ IP addresses and hostmasks the short answer is no, other people can not see your IP address.

The long answer is the following:

The only people that can see a user’s IP address is the user, and network staff. Anyone else will see an encrypted version of the IP address, or an encrypted version of the hostname if the IP address was able to be resolved.

Examples:

Instead of seeing host127-68-124-93.range127-124.virginmedia.com, other users will see protectedhost-A8B9B24A.range127-124.virginmedia.com
Instead of seeing 134.65.154.12, other users will see AD171E0.223C44F1.789AD83A.IP

Some users claim that they are able to see the IP address of other users. This is incorrect. What they are seeing is the IP address of the page they see when they try to visit a domain that does not resolve.

Examples:

If they claim to know the IP address of a staff member, with the geekshed.net vhost, the IP they really see if that of the server the geekshed.net website resides on.
If a user of OpenDNS claims to know the IP address of the virginmedia user (from the previous example), what they will really see is 208.69.36.132, which actually resolves to hit-nxdomain.opendns.com.
Some clients may resolve the “primary” domain name itself, in which case the user would see 212.250.162.12 for virginmedia.com

Disclaimer: this all goes out the window if the user unsets usermode x, which is the mode that hides their IP address/hostmask. This mode is set by default on connect and is removed either by doing “/umode2 -x” or “/hs off”. If umode x ever gets unset it can be turned back on with “/umode2 +x”

Quit Messages and What They Mean

Ryan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:09:12 +0000

Excess flood – you attempted to send too much data to the IRC server too quickly. The server thought you were attempting to flood it, and so it disconnected you. If this is happening to you a lot, you should check to see if your client offers a setting that will prevent this (mIRC users: Options -> IRC -> Flood).

Max sendQ exceeded – you failed to receive the data from the server quick enough; the server tried to send you too much data and closed the connection. This could happen if you use /who on larger channels too often.

Ping timeout – In order to confirm that connections are still active, servers regularly send out ping requests. When a client doesn’t respond to this within a set period of time, 2 minutes on GeekShed, it believes that the connection no longer active, and closes it. If this happening to you often, you should try using the closest server to you (or the next closest, if you’re already using the closest).

Connection reset by peer – when the IRC client uncleanly closes the connection to the server , the server may not realize that the connection has been terminated. In this situation, the user still appears to be online (a ghost user). The next time the server attempts to send data to the client, it realizes the connection no longer exists and resets it; the ghost is then disconnected.

Broken pipe – when there is a sudden break in the connection between the IRC server and client, the user will disconnect with this message.

*.geekshed.net *.geekshed.net – this is a netsplit, or when one server loses its connection from the rest of the network. For a more detailed explanation, as well as images, view the WikiPedia entry on Netsplits.

G:lined or Z:lined – for some reason, the user has been banned from the network. The reason, as well as a URL where the person may find more information is always given when staff ban someone. For information on the ban appeal process, please see the Ban Appeals page.

Killed (nick (reasons)) – this is given when a user has been forcibly disconnected from the network by a staff member. The staff member’s name and a reason are always given. This should be viewed as a warning, and the user may be banned if the behavior continues.

Flash Client Upgrade

Phil — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:16:40 +0000

We have, for quite a while now, offered TFlash as our web based IRC client. This was originally written as a quick replacement for the Java client we used previously. TFlash has, however, stood up to the test of time and has proved to be a very popular client amongst users.

We have now decided that it is time to upgrade TFlash to make it bigger and better. To this end, we contracted Mike Parks (BigRedPimp) of thinkrightgames.com to carry out the work. He is an incredibly experienced Flash developer and has made an exceptional job of the new Flash Client.

Today we have launched this new client and it should now be embedded on all of the sites that had the old Flash client embedded.

Development of the client started in early December and, since then, a team of testers have tirelessly tested it and removed bugs. We thank them for their help. If you do however find a bug, please report it using the address at the top of the new flash client.

BigRedPimp has put in a huge amount of effort with this project and we thank him unreservedly for his time and for doing this project for such a low cost. We are glad to call him a friend of GeekShed.

If you have any questions about the new Flash client, please come and see us in #help on irc.geekshed.net.

You can see the new TFlash at http://www.geekshed.net/chat/

GeekShed Management Script

Phil — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:04:53 +0000

GeekShed has an officially supported management script written by the GeekShed staff along with users Zetacon and GrimReaper. It offers a range of features including canned messages to help people with common questions as well as some decent channel and nickname management features.

We have checked out the tags directory at http://www.geekshed.net/gs-script/ so you can find each version of the script. We recommend using the latest version (i.e. the one with the highest version number).

Load it into the remotes section of your script editor just like any other script or place it in your mIRC install dir and type:

/load -rs gs-chanscript.mrc

Any problems, come see us in #help on irc.geekshed.net

Login Service

Phil — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:52:03 +0000

We have, for a while now, had a login service which links to our services database to allow you to login to areas of the site, such as the quote database, using your services login. This has always been an experimental feature however we are now happy that it’s working great and have finalized it. We have applied an SSL certificate to the site to allow your username and password to be encrypted as it passes over the Internet for our auth service to verify.

We hope to be able to use this service in the future for lots of cool areas of the site including web based nickname and channel registration.