Snoonet Updates

From: Network Director (duck@snoonet.org)

Good afternoon,

In 2018, Snoonet announced a partnership with IRC.com and made several changes to the network to support the services that they were introducing. These included a brand new IRC network running on modern IRC software, as well as a Bouncer-as-a-Service product which is still available and can be utilized with a custom application on the web, or on compatible Android and Apple devices.

Starting today, Snoonet will begin implementing changes which will separate the IRC.com network from Snoonet. We will introduce some minor changes as soon as possible, with the eventual removal of IRC.com servers from Snoonet to follow in the coming days. If you currently use irc.irc.com to connect and wish to remain on our network, please update your IRC clients now to use irc.snoonet.org. If you registered a NickServ account on IRC.com, your account will be retained in our database and you will be able to use your existing credentials to authenticate on Snoonet.

Additionally, users that currently have a vhost of irc.com/user/name will have their vhost changed to user/name. Users with a snoonet.org/user/name will have the option to change to user/name.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact a Snoonet operator in #help, or open a ticket at https://support.snoonet.org/

Thank you for using Snoonet!

From: Network Director (duck@snoonet.org)

Good afternoon,

On October 23rd, we carried out maintenance on our services package to fix an issue with respect to account registrations. While carrying out the maintenance, our services package behaved unexpectedly and after an investigation, we determined that some recent database changes are not recoverable and are thusly declaring an incident resulting in the loss of data.

If you registered an account on Snoonet, grouped a nickname to an existing account, registered a channel or made any changes to the access list of an existing channel, then please read the following information carefully.

What exactly happened?

Whilst conducting maintenance, we noted that Anope was not saving its database correctly and was instead storing all recent changes in memory. While attempting to render a fix, Anope suffered a segmentation fault which terminated its program. The fault that terminated the program was caused as Anope was trying to save its database.

How will Snoonet respond?

Upon declaring the data loss incident, we made the decision to restore the last backup that would work successfully. The backup was taken on October 4th at shortly after midnight (00:00) UTC. Any changes that were made after this time have been lost.

We’ve also added information to our logon news concerning the data loss incident.

For users that registered an account on or after the 4th of October, we have reached out to them directly to advise of the incident.

We will be immediately implementing stricter testing guidelines for any future software or configuration changes to avoid a repeat situation.

I realize that this situation is not ideal for some people and I offer my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any concerns, you can either ask our network staff by joining #help. You can also reach out to me directly via private message on the network or by email at duck@snoonet.org.

We are currently working on upgrading our network to InspIRCd v3. Older versions of some IRC clients (listed below) do not follow the IRC specification correctly and can not handle the way that InspIRCd v3 emits messages. More information about this can be found in the InspIRCd FAQ.

This update will keep us moving towards implementing cool new IRCv3 features.

Who needs to upgrade?

You may recently have noticed messages from a network bot suggesting you run software updates.

A large majority of our users are not affected. However, if you are using a client older than the minimum version specified in the table below, you may start to see broken behaviour in some cases.

If you still use any version of XChat we recommend upgrading to HexChat.

Snoonet is expanding its family and linking up with the new IRC network, IRC.com. For Snoonet users, the only real change you’ll feel is an influx of new users with some new cloaks. Staff wise, we are taking on no new opers over the link, and all current staff will remain as they are.

In order to reduce confusion between Snoonet and IRC.com users, a few changes will be made to cloaking and services bots. For most users, these changes will not be noticeable. Note that all these changes may not happen at once, for example, the cloak changes will take a bit more time than the rest.

1. Services will now display a vHost of @services instead of @snoonet/services/*. For example NickServ!NickServ@snoonet/services/NickServ will now simply be NickServ!NickServ@services.

2. vHosts for newly registered users will now either display @irc.com/user/<username> or @snoonet.org/user/<username> depending on which side of the network the user registered on.

3. Default and Snoo-ed nicks will change from SnooXXXXX to GuestXXXXX in order to be more network agnostic. Note that this will also affect how services force-nicks users to protect nicknames. As we understand that a number of channels ban Snoo-ed nicks we are providing a grace period of 7 days to channel operators to update their ban lists.

4. Unregistered users will now display a cloak containing @irc-<hash>.IP instead of @Snoonet-<hash>.IP. Note that this will not affect old bans against Snoonet-.IP cloaks, both types will be checked where needed.

TL;DR: The vHosts services bots use are changing to be more name agnostic. We’re making newly registered nicks have vhosts based on the side they registered on. We’re changing snoo-ed nicks to Guest. Cloaks are also undergoing changes to be more name agnostic, though bans on old ones will still work.

If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to ask a Snoonet staff member in #help or through our support system located at https://support.snoonet.org/

As part of our ongoing mission to serve our users and their communities, Snoonet is implementing some changes to our services and our policies to better reflect our commitment to privacy and security.  Specifically, we have made some changes in support of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect on May 25, 2018.

A brief overview of some of the changes:

• Our new Privacy Policy will come into effect on May 25, 2018. The revised policy doesn’t change the amount of data that we request from you, or impact how we use it.
  Instead, the policy provides more details about the information we collect, how we use it, and how we comply with GDPR and other privacy legislation. We have also provided information about how to request the removal of your information from both our IRC network and from services like our support system.
• As announced yesterday, we no longer offer the Statistics bot as a network service, and have purged all data collected by the service. For more information, please visit the Statistics page.
• We have updated the messages that are sent to you upon connecting to our IRC network to notify you of our revised Privacy Policy and to seek your consent to these changes.

Additional information

Privacy and security have been a long-term priority for us at Snoonet, and you can review our Privacy and Security page for additional information about our network’s privacy features, steps that you can take to protect your privacy when using our services, and some answers to frequently asked questions.

It’s important to be aware that by using our services on or after May 25, 2018, you will be agreeing to the changes outlined in our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to these changes, it is important that you stop using our services and take steps to delete your accounts and data.  For more information, please consult the policy or contact us through our support system at https://support.snoonet.org.