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UKChatterbox, a history

February 19th, 2012 | Posted by Lee in geeky-stuff - (0 Comments)
ukcb

A number of people have discussed the beginnings of UKCB, most versions lack facts, so here’s mine, using various sources and my own knowledge.

Bobby Amlani (30), (nick alias: Blaster) founded UKChatterbox whilst studying at the Anglia Ruskin University, along with his brother Parul, aka Paz. This year marks it’s 10th anniversary, during which time, the service has seen a lot of changes, users, staff members and problems. What follows is an in-depth history of UKChatterbox (UKCB) from it’s beginning as a small IRC network, upto the present day, the largest moderated UK based chatrooms provider with ~2 million registered users.

Firstly, UKChatterbox didn’t first appear on the net as “UKChatterbox”, it’s beginning dates back to 2001. A website called gasbubbles.com created by Bobby, provided chat targeted at university students. Profiles had more details then the current UKCB, with users allowed to post contact details for IM (AOL, MSN).

UKCB’s predecessor; Gasbubbles

 

 

 

 
Gasbubbles was a laid-back service, few rules and regulations. In time the website-side of it would fade as UKChatterbox grew, although for a large time UKCB’s chat rooms were on the same server as GasBubbles, eventually these would merge.
Mid-2002 saw the first appearance of UKChatterbox, this was accompanied by UKStudentChat and UKTeenChatrooms, all with their own sites, although seemingly all sharing the same database, little-known fact, ukstudentchat.co.uk will, to this day take you to ukchatterbox.

UKChatterbox was aimed at both users in the UK, and users from outside, who just wanted to talk … Read the rest

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Tutorial: Auto-voicing with Anope-1.8 [Basic]

December 3rd, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Anope | irc - (0 Comments)
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This is a common request, and one that most people end up using 3rd party bots/scripts or Anope modules for, when its functionality is in the Anope core already.

This works on recent versions of Anope-1.8 and requires us altering ChanServ’s levels.
ChanServ’s levels can only be altered and implemented when XOP is turned off, meaning you’ll need to add new users access using numeric values eg. VOP=3, AOP=5, SOP=10.

  1. So, first thing’s first, disable XOP if it’s enabled using /cs set #CHANNEL XOP OFF.
  2. If you do /cs levels #CHANNEL list you can see the required access levels for various commands, the one we’re after is AUTOVOICE.
  3. Do you want just registered users to get voiced, or all users? An unregistered user has level 0, a registered one has 1. For ALL users type /cs levels #CHANNEL set autovoice 0, and for REGISTERED users use /cs levels #CHANNEL set autovoice 1.

And that’s all there is to it, you may wish to use this for a degree of damage control in the event of flood-bots, eg. Setting the channel to +m and having ChanServ autovoice registered users. There are many possibilities, and the same idea can also be applied to the AUTOHALFOP, AUTOOP levels.

    … Read the rest

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New Anope 1.9 Module ns_massset

November 26th, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Anope | irc - (1 Comments)
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Another Anope module, and a port of an existing 1.7/1.8 module, ns_massset allows a services administrator with the nickserv/massset privilege to mass-set options for ALL registered users. Options include, Kill, KillQuick, AutoOP, and Secure.
This module is useful in newish installations where a default NickServ setting has been enabled/disabled and you wish to undo it. Note that some users may be happy with their settings, so this shouldn’t be used on an older install with a lot of users.

Module designed and tested on the 1.9.5 release.

To enable the command add the following to nickserv.conf
module { name = “ns_massset” }
command { service = “NickServ”; name = “MASSSET”; command = “nickserv/massset”; permission = “nickserv/massset”; }

Download… Read the rest

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New InspIRCd module: m_privdeaf

October 20th, 2011 | Posted by Lee in InspIRCd | irc - (0 Comments)

I’ve kept saying I will eventually get around to coding an InspIRCd module and here it is, m_privdeaf. I was looking for an equivalent to UnrealIRCd’s module of the same name, apparently it once existed but was removed, and never put into the core, the current way of blocking PM’s using InspIRCd is by using the callerid module.

m_privdeaf adds a umode +D which, when set blocks private messages from non-opers. This module could do with more testing, especially on a multi-server network, future versions will include configuration options to disallow opers, etc. It has been tested on InspIRCd-2.0.5.

Download… Read the rest

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UKCB: Success

September 25th, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Shenanigans - (2 Comments)
ukcb

It may have taken some drastic measures, but UKChatterbox have now made an announcement on the website and are enforcing password changes, as well as offering password/security advice that is very similar to what I gave previously in http://lethality.me.uk/2011/09/online-security/

The announcement which can be found at http://www.ukchatterbox.co.uk/article/170 reads as follows:

The UKChatterbox website has recently been the target of several attacks intended to disrupt services, and as part of an ongoing security update, all UKChatterbox users are being asked to change their passwords as a precautionary measure.

Some general tips for passwords and security:

- If you have the password to other sites and services set the same as your UKChatterbox password (or have done in the past), we would recommend changing those passwords too. It is never really a good idea to use the same password for multiple sites. In particular, passwords to your e-mail and bank accounts should always be unique and not used elsewhere.

- Choose a password that is sufficiently complex. Make sure that it is at the very least 8 characters long, a mixture of letters and numbers and preferably mix in some capital letters too.

- Check your security questions for your e-mail and other sites. If a site you are signed up to operates a security question system to retrieve lost passwords, make sure that the answer to the question is not something anyone could answer but you. There have been a lot of issues recently with peoples’ e-mail accounts being accessed because

… Read the rest

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UKCB’s arrogance, a post that shouldn’t be necessary.

September 21st, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Shenanigans - (2 Comments)
ukcb

As the title says, this is a post that shouldn’t be needed.
The subject: UKChatterbox’s outages, this isn’t just the outage within the last 2 weeks, this goes back to July 1st.
The post on the UKChatterbox “Service Status Page”:

There was a disruption to both the web and chat services from 18:00hrs Friday 1st July 2011 to 21:00hrs Sunday 3rd July 2011 due to a machine failure. This has now been resolved.

What happened was, (and this will no doubt be denied by them) was that the website was attacked using a popular form of exploit (SQL Injection aka sqli), this is when a user inserts extra characters and commands for example, when using a login form, to carry out tasks such as logging a user in as an admin, returning information that shouldn’t be available publicly. UKChatterbox has had problems with sql injections in the past, and apparently never bothered to fix them properly or learn anything, the website (whilst most users are blindly happy with it’s presentation) is full of old, out-dated code. Updating the code to use newer methods of accessing databases can stop this. Incidentally the recent bold red maintenance message on the homepage was fluentcode fixing these issues now they’ve been made fully aware of them.

Anyway, back to UKChatterbox’s delayed downtime notices. Their next step was a server migration:

July 6th 2011: A major migration of the UKChatterbox website has been performed in order to remedy earlier problems. Access to the website may

… Read the rest

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