#irchelp

Flood Protection and Ignoring People

for users of mIRC, the Windows Internet Relay Chat client

by Ruth Mullen aka hershey, updated 9/5/97

HTML translation by Joseph Lo aka Jolo

When you’re using mIRC there are several ways to get rid of people harassing or flooding you. We will give detailed help in this file, but first of all you should make sure you use the latest mIRC. Please upgrade if you’re using an older version. Most of the info in this file will NOT help you on versions older than v4.7. And you do not need any scripts or bots for flood protection. Everything you need is built right into mIRC.

The main goal for flooders on IRC is to get you disconnected from the IRC server you use. A server usually disconnects you for sending too much data to it in a certain period of time, or if you try to send it data when it hasn’t finished processing your previous data. So what flooders do is send you lots of CTCP requests and if you answer them all you’ll get disconnected. These kind of floods are called CTCP floods. mIRC’s flood protection and/or ignoring these people will stop this.

Besides CTCP floods you can also be bombarded with useless text or other rubbish, a text flood. Or people can harass you with what they (continue to) say to you. Dont argue with people, a simple ‘ignore’ will help a lot better.

1) Fully Automatic Flood Protection

You can protect yourself against people who are flooding you with the automatic anti-flood system in mIRC. Simple type the command

/flood 400 20 2 30

in any window in mIRC and you’ll activate it for now and the future. You can check your flood protection settings under the File/Options/Flood/ menu. This makes sure that -others- cant make you to send too much data to the server. Usually a server has a buffer of about 512 bytes. mIRC therefore counts the number of bytes you’ve sent to a server and if this exceeds a certain number, mIRC waits for the server to be ready again, before it continues sending data. In the mean time it nicely buffers unsent lines. This should protect you properly from all sorts of CTCP floods and so on. You set the amount of bytes mIRC may safely send (for instance, 400 bytes), the amount of lines it may buffer (for instance, 20), the amount of lines it may store maximal per user (for instance, 2) and how long any flooder should be ignored (for instance, 30 secs) by the command

/flood 400 20 2 30

2) Ignoring People

If certain people continue to try to flood you off IRC, you can put them on ignore. You can ignore a person or a group of people, whatever you want. But dont overdo it ... you'll soon hear _nobody_ anymore ;o)

You can ignore everything somebody does or says to you by setting a full ignore on either that person, or in extreme cases, everybody from the same Internet Service Provider. In the File/Options/Control/ menu you’ll see a list of all people you currently ignore.

Here are some different options for ignoring people or sites. Where you see “nick” below, put in the person’s nickname.

command what it does

/ignore nick 3 ignore one person totally

/ignore nick 4 ignore all other people from the same Internet Provider

Normally, if people flood you, it is enough to just ignore CTCP requests. This will allow them to normally talk to you but they wont be able to get you disconnected from IRC.

command what it does

/ignore -t nick 3 ignore all CTCP requests from one person

/ignore -t nick 4 ignore all CTCP requests from people on the same Internet Provider

/ignore -t !@* To ignore all CTCP requests from everybody

If you activate mIRC’s built-in flood protection (/flood 400 20 2 30) and put individuals who keep disturbing you on ignore, you’ll be pretty ‘safe’ and you’ll enjoy IRC as it is meant to be; a place to CHAT :-) Have fun!

others.