Why does joining/leaving a channel too often a earn a ban? It seems to really piss people off. Why? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- drakejones99 · 2022-02-15 08:57 I was setting up a server that happens to scrape a couple irc channels needed to de-obfuscate files. The setup was a little complicated. It took me about week. During the build, I joined/left the irc channels too many times and got banned. My first un-ban request was honored, but the second one really upset the Moderator. I was really shocked. He said he "even got a message from an ircop". What is an ircop? What's the harm? Is it a security issue? Does it impact irc server performance. My rig is all set now and I'm using ZNC. I'd really like to understand more about the issue. Thanks in advance. <> Thank you for your explanations. I understand now how too many joins/leaves could be an issue. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- theLJR · 2022-02-15 09:22 Could be used to try and flood a channel is the issue ---------------------------------------------------------------------- theLJR · 2022-02-15 09:22 Could be used to try and flood a channel is the issue ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jddddddddddd · 2022-02-15 09:25 You were probably banned by a bot for potentially flooding the channel. Whilst the easiest way for a malicious user to attempt to make a channel unusable by flooding it, is to repeatedly post messages to the channel, it's also possible to flood it by joining and leaving, and then joining and leaving, etc. In both scenarios the channel fills up with messages from the user and it becomes difficult to read genuine messages. The bot probably flagged you as a false positive to leaving and re- joining X number of times within Y minutes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jddddddddddd · 2022-02-15 09:37 >Could be used to try and flood a channel is the issue Loving the fact that you've posted this comment *twice* here :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AmarandeGaidin · 2022-02-15 09:41 The bans were probably because leaving and reentering the channel so often was considered spamming/flooding. Unlike the relative silence of some more modern chat apps (Discord, for instance, announces newcomers in a fashion which can be shunted to an area that people won't/can't look in, and does not announce departures at all), every time someone joins or leaves an IRC channel, a notification is generated to every single person present there. On top of the human spamminess, when IRC was more popular a not uncommon abuse was for someone to run a bot program that caused lots of users to rapidly spam a channel with nonsense (including in many cases joins and leaves) which could even cause people to get disconnected from the network for having too large of a pending send queue from the server. This would be done either to force people out of a channel so it could be taken over by the attacker, or simply for trolling purposes. As for the IRCop part, that's short for IRC Operator, who are simply put, the server level admin staff (who may or may not also have authority over the network as a whole - there is no unified policy across networks in IRC, each net determines its own rules). The tradition on IRC was usually that IRC Operators do not officially intervene in channel matters ("IRC is an unmoderated international medium" being a frequent statement in server login announcements), but they might have been friends with the channel moderator (which often results in unofficial favors being granted on some networks) or the server you were using might not be one that allows bots (in which case you were probably being investigated as to whether you were one). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-02-15 09:47 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- drakejones99 · 2022-02-15 10:46 Nothing sinister and nothing to hide. There's just nothing more to the story. I'm a little taken aback by your assertion. I've been scraping the same two channels for years and only had a ban about five years ago when I first built the rig. The explanation for the ban was that I joined/left the channels too many times. By the way, I fixed my shit. And, I'm using ZNC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-02-15 12:35 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SpiritualProcedure19 · 2022-02-15 12:50 I didn't think irc was still around lol ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LameBMX · 2022-02-15 14:46 Reddit app on android likes to randomly double post for people and don't show you double posted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- deepend_tilde · 2022-03-09 02:54 I personally just have my irc client not show those server messages. So it doesn’t matter to me. But the average person it probably gets annoying.