Re: someone has threatened to take down one of the servers in the room I am an op for

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 03:34:12PM +1200, Kathryn Willaims wrote:
> Hi

Hi Kathryn,

> I am an OP for the #tweedybookguy  chat room
> 
> We have just had someone called  NazDebo come in
> asking if we knew how to take down one of the servers.

Were they just making conversation, or were they threatening to do
this unless you gave them something?

> The whois feature showed this  
> 
> NazDebo-DKDcKiHFdhaGMRfG4A5l40V3cWibshEk8qRI+MK6XZSBm1QnxK0LtKxOck334EZe@public.gmane.org *
> Brian Barron

Unfortunately there isn't much we can do against this person based
on your word alone.  Hopefully you understand why - we could get an
email tomorrow saying the same things about you.

> Neither I nor the other OP that was in the room at the
> time wanted to rev this person up by booting and
> banning them.  So we tried to persuade them not to.  
> Somehow I can't see that we were very successful.

Well, thank you for your efforts (and the warning) in any case.

In future if someone suggests they will do something like that, the
best thing to do is to

a) kick/ban them from the channel where they are saying it
b) cease all communication with them
c) report the details of it to IRC staff in #help (or possibly by
   email to admins-Hb7ITwsGSD4lroQnaJEqWdi2O/[email protected] if no one is around in #help).

Thre is usually no point agonising over whether they really will do
it or not.  99% of the time these are just little kids acting
tough, trying to get some respect by threatening people online.  If
you give in to it and try to keep them happy, then like all bullies
there will be no end to it.  Denying them the chance to be in the
channel intimidating people is usually enough to make them leave
without further incident.

If you have really annoyed them then at this point they might decide
to flood some of your users or your channel.  We have documentation
at http://blitzed.org/help/ which tells you how to deal with that.

If they decide to take it even further and use denial of service
attacks against your users or our servers there is usually not a lot
that you or we can do about that other than try to weather it.
Blitzed has been in existence for almost 3 years and we have never
yet had any sort of DoS attack large enough to take all of our
servers offline.  Of course it is possible for that to happen to us,
but it is not likely.

So in summary, if you don't want someone in your channel, my advice
is just to kick them out, don't pay any attention to their stories
of how they will attack your users or bring our servers down.  It
_is_ a good idea not to really antagonise them, because that raises
the chances that they really will do that, but getting them out of
the channel is almost always the best thing to do.

-- 
Andy Smith,
The Blitzed IRC Network