Talk City Closing Doors To IRC

sparky writes "Talk City is going to cut off access to people using any but their proprietary IRC client starting on 12 April. This is a modified version of Pirch, so it runs only on Win32 and MacOS. Oh, yeah, it also runs ads for them, and has a reader board. They are effectively cutting off from their IRC network users of free software, and people who value choice, even with proprietary software. Perhaps their users should consider Open Projects Network?" You may even find some alleged Slashdot Authors there.

Comments

The reason Talkcity is closing IRC

[DanMcS]

is because they are unable to deal with the barrage of attacks on their irc servers from people using scriptable clients. In the explanation that was sent out to hosts, they explain that they are unable to stop the flooding, nick stealing (all TC nicks require passwords), and various war scripts that people are using on the server through these clients. This smells like BS to me, but I am unable to prove it, because I don't know enough about how IRC servers and these attack scripts works. But I chat on other servers, and they never seem to have those kinds of problems. Undernet, DALnet, whatever, I've never seen anywhere near the problems on there that I do on TalkCity.
I suspect these come from a couple of sources. Socially, by proclaiming themselves bigger, better, and cleaner than the rest of IRC, they make themselves a target. Technically, they use these stupid proxy servers that, while protecting a user's privacy, also make it impossible to effectively ban someone; only their superops, the CSAs, can ban someone by host, and then it is server wide. This neuters the hosts they generally use to keep order; on another server, we could ban the guy and be done, but on TalkCity we have to waste the CSA's time to get it done right.
This "solution" doesn't address either of these basic problems. That it doesn't reveals them to be the moneygrubbing rats they are, using the server only to increase their adcounts. They did the same thing a while back, adding message boards (with ads) to the server, that all hosts had to chat on, and telling all the forums and hosts that they had to have regularly updated webpages (with ads). There's nothing wrong with ads on pages; changing the structure of the place to increase adcount, while proclaiming that outside "hacker" forces are making them do this, is wrong. TalkCity is no longer a fun place to host, and that's why I'm done there, and a lot of other people too.

Black Magic

[Kishar]

Well, as I see it, this is pretty silly. The problems listed on the info page are server-side issues, easily repaired (in fact already repaird on many servers). To quote a luser on TC, "If TalkCity was the government, they'd ban cars to prevent vehicular accidents." The funny part of this client-side, administrative solution is that they've forgotten the golden rule:

Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.

How long before $hacker figures out $black_magic and adds it to the $irc_client_of_choice (isn't source code nice?)?
(BTW, no, it is NOT a simply version request)
</MHO>
-Mith