Session limit breaches

From Blitzed

Users often do this "by accident" because they have no idea that we might restrict this in any way. Quite often this affects web-based IRC clients like CGI:IRC which have been set up for a particular website/channel.

Unless it was obviously abusive (a bunch of flood bots for example) then you might want to try and work out which channel they came from. Unfortunately this isn't possible when all the clients are gone from the network, so you would need to quickly do it as soon as you start seeing the session limit kills.

To see what channel a client may be in:

/who +Ch ip.or.hostname.here

Once you've done that, go to the channel and find out whoever is responsible for the system they're all coming from. Inform them that we only allow 5 users per host without prior arrangement, and if they need more they should come to #help and ask.

To actually set this up for them will require a services admin. All you need to do is apply a session limit exception:

/os exception add +0 host.name 50 exception for 50 users from host.name

Things to bear in mind:

• Don't give them an exception far in excess of what they need, so ask how many users they think they will have on at once.
• Users often overestimate how many people they will have on at once, and sometimes they underestimate. An exception for more than 50 users would be unusual, for less than 15 users is usually pointless.
• These sites and channels come and go and the users themselves have no idea what their plans are. Regularly check the exception list to see what is being used.
• You can see who is near to their limits with the following command: /os session list 4
• The current exception system has some deficiencies, the most notable of which is that it only goes by whatever host the irc server tells to services. This means that if the host doesn't resolve, it is treated as a new host. You may know that foo.example.com resolves to 192.168.0.1, but services does not and will treat them both as two different hosts. Add whatever the users are on now and be prepared to add another later if it changes.
• It's not possible for us to give exceptions to dynamic IPs. No workaround possible.