The most common variety of channel takeover uses disconnections caused by a netsplit; this is called riding the split. After such mass disconnections, a channel may be left without users, allowing the first rejoining user to recreate the channel and gain operator status. When the servers merge, any pre-existing operators retain their status, allowing the new user to kick out the original operators and take over the channel.
A simple prevention mechanism involves timestamping (abbreviated to TS), or checking the creation dates of the channels being merged. This was first implemented by Undernet (ircu) and is now common in many IRC servers. If both channels were created at the same time, all user statuses are retained when the two are combined; if one is newer than the other, special statuses are removed from those in the newer channel.
Additionally, a newer protection involving timestamping is used when a server splits away from the main network (when it no longer detects that IRC services are available), it disallows anyone creating a channel to be given operator privileges.
Read more about this topic: Internet Relay Chat Takeover
Famous quotes containing the words riding the, riding and/or split:
“Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)