Guide to Administration on the IRC Channels

Environment

Everyone with a Rockbox cloak does have at least basic operator access on both #rockbox and #rockbox-community. This is primarily intended to help out with malicious users and spammers. Other uses of this privilege should be thought about carefully in order to prevent abuse and be used sparingly.

A Brief Explanation of Hostmasks

The standard format:

*!*@*

The first asterisk is their nick. The second is their ident or username on their client. The last is their hostname.domain, IP address, or cloak. One can "nick ban", "ident ban", or "IP ban" by picking and choosing which asterisks to fill in in the ban string. One can also narrow the ban more by including more than one section of this information. So,

/mode +b foo!*@bar.com

would ban anyone connecting from bar.com with the nick foo. In hostmasks, there are 2 wildcards - * and ? . An asterisk can be used in replacing the information by meaning "all" and can also mean anything ending in x, anything beginning with x, or anything between x and y depending on where it is placed. A question mark refers to one character only.

When dealing with people coming in from cgi-irc, you will want to work with the part that actually corresponds to their IP. An example of what the entire hostmask may look like is as follows: i=4208ae1e@gateway/web/cgi-irc/labb.contactor.se/x-4e5ee637b77be32d . The section that we want to work with is the ident which cgi:irc makes their actual IP in hex. In otherwords, if we were to ban this user, we would do the following

/mode +b *!i=4208ae1e@*

If you are unsure of a user's hostmask, you can do a /whois to find this out.

Commands and Suggested Usage

Note: Any of these with a + or a -, can be switched with the opposite sign to perform the opposite action.

/cs op #rockbox

Use this to give yourself op powers.

/cs op #rockbox -nick

Use this to de-op yourself or others. It is just a cleaner way of doing the process. If you do not need the powers at the moment, please do this as soon as you can, as having your op status displayed will make people act differently to you. This latter part is also part of Freenode's suggested policy.

 /mode #rockbox +q *!*@*

This is the suggested first course of action for problem users after a warning. This is essentially a mute. To best take advantage of this, fill in the last asterisk (the hostname.domain or IP address section) with the appropriate information. It is the same as setting the mode +b %*!*@*, and will actually show up this way. What differentiates this from a ban is the percent sign before the hostmask. This is best used for a period of time in which the problem user can either cool off, or leave.

/kick nick

This is the suggested second course of action for problem users. It is pretty self-descriptive if you are remotely familiar with IRC.

/mode #rockbox +b *!*@*

This is the last resort for problem users and typically should only be used after the previous two methods. This will ban a user from the channel. To best take advantage of this, fill in the last asterisk (the hostname.domain or IP address section) with the appropriate information.

http://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml This is a handy link for more advanced modes, but these should not really be used unless there is a special case or absolute chaos. #rockbox's default modes are +tnz.