IRC Services Manual

Appendix D. Known issues

There are a few issues which have been reported as bugs in the past or discovered by the author, but which either are not consistently reproduceable or are a consequence of the way Services works and not easily avoidable:

• Services appears to incorrectly detect "mode bouncing" (i.e., the IRC server reversing Services' mode changes) in some cases. When this occurs, commands like KICK and TOPIC as well as auto-ops and mode locking will no longer work on that channel. If this problem occurs, appropriate messages will be written to the log file; the problem can be worked around by either clearing the channel (removing all users from the channel) or restarting Services. Adding the NoBouncyModes directive in ircservices.conf will prevent this problem from occurring, but will cause mode floods if you have an incorrectly configured server on your network.

• When kicking users from forbidden channels (or in other cases when a user tries to join an empty channel and is kicked), Services will generate debug log messages about "MODE +b for unknown channel". These are a side effect of the order in which Services processes the operations involved in the kickban; they are harmless and can be safely ignored. The same or similar messages can also appear during a netburst when modes are sent for a channel after all the users in the channel have been kicked, or when joins and modes are sent for a user who gets autokilled.

• If you try to enter an empty channel and get kicked and banned by ChanServ, you cannot get in with UNBAN or INVITE even if you would normally have privileges to do so because ChanServ reports that the channel does not exist. This is because ChanServ does not keep track of channels that it is currently residing in after a kickban in the same way that it does for ordinary users.

• When using protocols that support ban exceptions, users can get around the "ban" part of a kickban in an empty channel by sending a ban exception quickly enough that the server processes it before Services is able to kick the user, allowing the user to repeatedly rejoin the channel (and get immediately kicked again). This is a side effect of Services not tracking empty channels in which ChanServ is residing, but if your IRC server's flood protection is set up properly, this will not be a problem in practice (there are many ways for users to generate more network traffic than a join/part loop).

• There appear to be some cases in which channel modes (+k and +o have been reported) are set twice in succession for the same channel. This naturally has no effect on the channel itself, but some users have reported it as annoying. Services attempts to detect and correct this, but it may still occur in some cases.

• When setting NickServ options for other users as a Services administrator, NickServ will incorrectly respond with "Your (option name) has been changed" or similar messages, as though the Services admin's nickname settings had been changed. (The target nickname's settings are in fact correctly modified, while the admin's settings are left alone.)

• If you disable one or more of the nickserv/access, nickserv/autojoin, memoserv/main, and memoserv/ignore modules, delete a nickgroup, create a new nickgroup that has the same ID, and re-enable the module(s), the new nickgroup will keep any data from those module(s) that belonged to the old nickgroup. Since nickgroup IDs are assigned randomly, this should be a rare occurrence.

• If you compile on a Macintosh (OSX) system using dynamic modules, the encryption/unix-crypt module may fail to load. If this happens, compile using static modules instead (./configure -use-static-modules).

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