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:
“John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar- room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)