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20 May 2003

A handful of our bots have reached the top 20 list on Eggdrop's uptime contest, with more than 300 days uptime on the shell. These bots must now be taken offline for upgrades, but we hope to see them return to the same position next year.
Click here for a screenshot
 

12 May 2003

Siliconbot 2.6 has concluded testing and is being loaded on to all service bots. This new script opens up a world of new features, as well as improving and correcting existing ones. Recently discovered exploits have now been bypassed, eliminating the need for patches.

Some of the signifcant changes include:

• New channel settings

Several new channel settings have been added, to provide increased protection and monitoring.
• addons

This is a replacement for the old setting +games. It determines whether addon scripts may be used in the channel.
• banmon

Ban monitoring will cause the bot to keep a watch of the channel's banlist.  If there are too many channel bans set at any particular time, it will remove a small number of the oldest ones to make room for new bans.
• clone-limit

This setting will enforce a static limit on the number of clones which will be permitted in the channel. If that number is exceeded, the bot will ban all matching clones from the channel.
• keeptopic

When keeptopic is enabled the bot will store the channel's topic in its memory, and will re-set it if the topic is somehow lost.
• verbose

Whenever a command is issued by a recognised user on the channel, via msg, the bot will report that command to channel ops via notice. This applies only to a small number of commands that affect what the bot does on the channel.

• Improved list searching

It is now even easier to search through the banlists, exemptlists and invitelists. The bot will permit any of the following identifiers to be used:  an entry number, a number range of entries, a matching string, a non-matching string, a channel name or 'global' for the global banlist.

In addition to this, the command may be suffixed with -quick or -short to display the list in less detail, at a faster rate.

Example:  Templar banlist #chat 10-20 !*sandy* -short
In this example, Templar would display the banlist for #chat, but would only display entries between 10 and 20, which don't contain the string 'sandy', and would display only one line of information per ban entry, instead of the usual four.

• More bantypes

In the past, ban durations have been expressed with one unit of time; i.e. '8d' for eight days, '2h' for two hours. It is now possible to mix these units in any combination and order you wish. For example, '2h30m8d' would signify a ban duration of eight days, two hours and thirty minutes.

• Ban locking system

It is sometimes neccessary to 'lock' a ban in the channel, making it a sticky ban.  Sticky bans cannot be removed from the channel's banlist, but act as normal bans within the bot's internal banlist. The new BANLOCK command allows you to easily list sticky bans, and to add or remove bans from the sticky list.  The bans that you add must already be active in the bot's banlist, however.

• Secured login

To increase security, the bot now tracks logged-in users by their nickname on IRC, as well as conventional host matching. If the bot loses track of a user, they will be prompted to login again. If you use more than one nickname at a time, you will need to login from each in order to issue commands. This feature can, however, be disabled using the set command.
 
• WebTV support

Users who connect to IRC via WebTV or Java, are unable to see notices sent to them. Because of this flaw, they are unable to receive information sent to them by the bot and can not know whether a command has been effective.

This problem now been remedied, thanks to a new user setting 'output'. A known user on the bot's userlist may choose how the bot will display information to him/her. By default this is via notice, but the option may be set to 'privmsg', 'dcc', or 'channel'.

For information on using this command, issue:  botnick help set output

To do so, type: botnick help

If you have any questions about this new script, or wish to report a bug, please contact tom@siliconbot.org.
 

8 May 2003

We refuse to provide bots on BulgariaNet any longer, after the netadmin attempted to gain control of our channel, using OperServ to remove bans set against him in the process.
 

2 May 2003

Dara_Phai is no longer a member of BotService.