Global Gamers News Archive

Spam protection and other useful things - Posted by ButtaKnife on December 2, 2008

A long time ago, Global Gamers had a service known as SpamServ. It was able to be registered to channels and gave those channels a measure of protection against spammers. Unfortunately, due to some bugs in its code, it was taken offline. Early Sunday morning, Global Gamers was pleased to re-introduce those features, but this time, they are built into ChanServ! Channels are now able to activate and customize spam protection using the commands found in !help spam and !help set protection. Channels that were already registered have the protection disabled by default, so your channels won't act any different than they have been. Newly registered channels will have repeat flood and text flood checking enabled by default.

Along with the new protection, we didn't want ChanServ to contribute to the spam by adding all of the new settings to the existing list of channel settings available in !set. There were already too many options for channels to be sent all at once. The solution? We have categorized the settings! Now when you type !set, you are given a list of categories. You can then type !set <category> to see the settings in that category. Want to see the settings related to channel protection (including the new anti-spam features)? Type !set protection and the list of protection-related settings will be shown. Everything else works the same as before. We hope this makes life a little less confusing and spammy for channel owners.

There are lots of other really useful things on Global Gamers that aren't new, but you may not know about them. Here are some we thought you might like to know about:

• ChanServ has a built-in Quote database system! Want to save the hilarious thing that someone just said? !addquote it! Find out how to set up and use the Quote system in your channel by visiting the Quote Services Guide.


• We recently added a feature to ChanServ to track recently used topics in channels. The !history command lets you see the recent topic (and command) history. If you want to switch topics back to an older topic, find its ID number in !history and then use the !restoretopic command to put it back. It's great if you have pranksters changing your topic when you're not around.


• Going away for a while and you don't want your account to expire? There's an easy solution: Vacation mode! Just type /ns vacation to turn it on. When you log back on the next time, the Vacation mode will be turned off. While Vacation mode is turned on, though, your account will not expire.


• Another useful NickServ feature is AutoReclaim. If you want to make sure no one uses your registered nicknames while you're gone, type /ns set autoreclaim on and NickServ will protect the nicknames registered to your account.


• Channel fakehosts are a great way for your clan, community, organization, or group of friends to use the same fakehost. If you have a registered channel, just ask a Global Gamers Support Team member to set up your channel fakehost. Once set, anyone with enough access in your channel can use !usefakehost. By default, OPs or higher can use it, but you can change that with the HostUsers setting in ChanServ.


• ChanServ tracks some neat statistics about registered channels, including the most visitors ever, most visitors today, and more. Just use the !info command to take a look!


• You can have MemoServ memos sent to your account's email address as well as directly to you on IRC. Simply type /ms set email on and MemoServ will begin forwarding a copy of your memos. You can only receive one memo per sender until you have read the previous memos on IRC.


• If you want to give someone OPs, HalfOPs, or Voice, but they don't have a NickServ account, you can use hostmask-based access in your channel. Hostmasks are tricky if you haven't used them before, but if you are familiar with them, you can use the !addhostmask command to add the hostmask to be automatically OPed, HalfOPed, or Voiced.


• Our IRC server software has some built in modes to give you additional privacy. If you do not want anyone to see what channels you are in when they /whois you, type /mode yournickname +n. You can also hide your idle time so that others can't see how recently you were sending messages on IRC. You can hide this by typing /mode yournickname +I.


• Channel owners can see some very interesting information about their channel, even when they're not actually in the channel, using the PEEK command. Type /cs peek #channelname to view the details.


• Wondering what the weather is like outside? Most of us don't want to be surprised by blizzards or scorching hot days, so be sure to use the !weather and !forecast commands to see what the weather has in store for you!

Our website has a wealth of information to help you learn how to use IRC, ChanServ, NickServ, and more. But, that's not all the website has to offer! Be sure to check out our Forums where you can chat, get help, and even offer suggestions on how we can improve. Also, if you ever find yourself G-lined from Global Gamers by accidentally having too many connections, our Connection Help page has a tool that will let you automatically unban yourself from the network. It's very easy and it will help you get right back on IRC in no time.

We hope you enjoy all that Global Gamers has to offer. Please let us know if there's anything else we can do to serve you better. We will continue to add new things and try to make Global Gamers easier to use. We thank you for all of your support!

Lastly, Global Gamers would like to apologize for the outages late Sunday and all day Monday that kept our website, quote system, and clan system offline. Our systems are back online now, and we are taking steps to prevent another server problem from crippling those systems. We sincerely hope the downtime did not cause too much trouble for any of you.

Comments:

No comments.

Login to your Global Gamers account to leave a comment!