----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 6:41 PM Subject: [Coder-Com] BADCHAN has to match exactly..?
> Now, we're used to being able to use wildcards in BADCHANs, so we're going > to get rid of the GLINE_EXACT flag in there. Just wanted to check that it's > intentional that wildcard BADCHANs can't be set? Probably, as a means of preventing abuse. BADCHAN, as I recall, is intended primarily to deal with channels whose sole purpose is the disruption of IRC or the Internet in general, such as the channels that SCRIPT.INI and its descendants use to forward backdoor info to the script kiddies that distribute them. As each generation of SCRIPT.INI uses a specific dump channel, the banning of specific channels is what is particularly important for this purpose. Wildcard BADCHANs, on the other hand, are only useful for banning groups of similar channels based on a keyword in the name. However, there is no earthly purpose to this on Undernet, as Undernet is an unmoderated medium which does not (for philosophical as well as very compelling legal reasons) exercise or purport to exercise control over content that travels through its servers. Therefore, there is no reason to include the feature, and every reason (CPU time in particular, as JOIN is of course a very frequent command on an IRC network, and the BADCHAN list has to be checked on every JOIN - exact matches aren't too harsh on CPU time but wildcard string matches in C tend to be) not to. It is possible that this should be an F line feature if major networks using the ircu wish to use wildcard matches, though. OTOH, I'm not entirely certain what this would do if some servers allow wildcards and others don't, but this can easily be worked around by making one or the other decision mandatory across a given network (which is already done with some F lines on some nets, such as the server hiding features on Undernet).
