A new look at IRC

Om · none Joined: 30 Oct 2004 Posts: 24

This is an idea I've been thinking about off and on for a while now, I've never done anything towards coding for it.

So, what I've been thinking of would be a way of running an irc network, except without really running it. Staff would be restricted to keeping the IRCd running, and the users themselves would deal with most of the other things that staff do on a network now.

eg, someone comes into a help channel because they registered their nick but typoed the email address. In a 'normal' network then some services admin person could fix this for them. But with my idea, then any users who happened to be there could 'vote' for resetting the registration, so maybe after two users had 'voted' for resetting the registration, it would be reset.

Obviously you'd need to have some sort of levels for the different commands, as with /chghost then maybe just a couple of people 'voting' for the command would be enough, but for a permanant akill then you'd want a much higher 'level'. I think you would also need some kind of system to prevent people just connecting a load of clients to get what they wanted,some kind of system for users ranking each other, and only letting one connection per IP have 'voting' powers. Rankings could also let older members of the network have more 'votes'. And when a new users joins the network, then as they show that they're not a lame script kiddie, then they would gradually get accepted and ranked higher.

So in theory (or my theory anyway) then you could have a large network, almost entirely user-administrated, and the larger it got, the quicker response times for akilling spammers could get.

I know this couldn't entirely do away with the need for staff, doubtlessly people would try and exploit the system, and you would still need staff for dealing with those cases. But I think the idea of a network working like this is pretty cool Smile

So, what do you think? Any huge holes I've somehow missed? Suggestions? Anything? (preferably flaming excluded)

Om

Oh, and I know this wouldn't work for everyone, I'm not trying to tell you you should do this on your network, at all.

Dan_C · none Joined: 09 Nov 2004 Posts: 18

Wouldn't that allow other users to "steal" other users nicks? All it would take, is for two users who like reacking havic to vote on an unexpecting nick, and basically taking over that users nickserv account, gaining access to the users channel's, ect. Wouldn't that be a problem?

Om · none Joined: 30 Oct 2004 Posts: 24

That was what the ranking system was supposed to stop, and you'd never be able to take over a nickserv account.

Commands like dropping nickserv accounts would have to be highly ranked, such that to do so you'd need several users with a reasonable rank to be able to do it.

At least, that's how I would try and solve it Smile

Dan_C · none Joined: 09 Nov 2004 Posts: 18

with a lot of thought, and a significant amount of time to weed through the problems that come up during it's implementation it may work, but I believe their better alternatives for the majority of the problems. (e.i. enable it so users recieve an auth code in their email when they register a nick, and force them to auth. the nick before it's forced to expire.) and for some of the other problems that occur, you could easily implement "teams(Abuse/Kline/Linking/Ect.)" made up of opers, and may'be even some non-opers who have been on the network for a while. A voting system could be effective, but I don't think anything's as effective as the way iRC Networks have been ran in the past.

Om · none Joined: 30 Oct 2004 Posts: 24

TheWingedOne · Newbie Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 71 Location: The Void...

Funnily enough I'm already involved in a project I want to head in this direction.

We've started to by allowing non-opers to use many services functions, and we've also started to establish the "teams" idea outlined.