Linking of message accounts is now significantly less likely to produce
false-positives.
Previously, any hostmasks with matching nick!*@* would be strongly linked
together. This led to falsely-linking accounts, either inadvertently or
intentionally.
For example, Bob might also be known as Bob_ and Bobby,
but primarily uses Bob as his main nick. Somebody else might join with
Bobby and end up being linked to Bob. Now both Bob and the new Bobby are
linked together as the same person, but likely with different *!user@host.
Now if the new Bobby ever gets banned, then Bob will also end up being
banned for evading Bobby's ban.
This was a sore spot in the previous linking implementation.
This new implementation has several adjustments to more intelligently link
accounts only when they're proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be the same
person (e.g. by matching nickserv accounts, etc).
Consequently, rather than aggressively linking accounts and catching more
ban-evaders at the risk of potentially falsely-linking accounts and falsely
detecting innocent people as ban-evaders, this new implementation will instead
link accounts more reliably at the risk of potential ban-evaders not yet being
linked together and thus being able to evade a ban.
This is a more preferable and reasonable risk. Active channel ops should be
able to catch any obnoxious ban-evaders that slip through this net.
Sometimes people might join the channel uncloaked and get join-flood banned
with their uncloaked hostmask, and then later attempt to join the channel while
cloaked but the network will prevent them from joining since it checks their IP
address against the banlist in addition to their cloak.
Attempts to use unbanme while cloaked will look for a ban matching the cloak
instead of the IP address and will not find their uncloaked join-flood ban.
To fix this, we now traverse all known aliases/hostmasks for an individual
requesting a join-flood unban and remove any and all bans matching any of the
hostmasks linked to this individual.
PBot will now use weak links if the ip address portion of a hostmask
hasn't been seen in the last 48 hours in order to prevent false-positive
linking of dynamic ip addresses.
Weak links are excluded from ban-evasion logic.
Weak links can be manually upgraded to strong links with the `akalink`
command if a human confirms they are the same person through the `aka -w`
command.
Individuals with matching nicks or matching nickserv accounts, etc, will
automatically be strongly linked, as usual.
Improve linking of known aliases for users by using an aliases table
to track the linkages.
Improve check-bans implementation to use new aliases table for
significant performance gains and reduced resource usage.
to register handlers to listen for events.
Update IRCHandlers module to use new event dispatcher to dispatch
irc.events. Update several modules to register with dispatcher
to listen for irc.events.
Improve handling of reconnection upon unexpected disconnection.
Todo: update more things to use new event dispatcher logic.
Allows changing of bot configuration values without needing to restart
bot instance or needing to edit pbot.pl script.
Registry will initially be populated with default values from pbot.pl,
but if a registry file exists then the registry values will take
precedence over the pbot.pl values. For instance, if you regset the
bot trigger to '%' then the trigger will be '%' even if pbot.pl has '!'
or something else explicitly set.
Some registry items can have trigger hooks associated with them. For
instance, the irc->botnick registry entry has a change_botnick_trigger
associated with it which changes the IRC nick on the server when a new
value is set via regset/regadd.
Tons of other fixes and improvements throughout.
Added MessageHistory.pm and MessageHistory_SQLite.pm. May eventually port
and add MessageHistory_Hashtable.pm as was done with Quotegrabs, but this is
not particularly high on the todo list.
Antiflood.pm has been updated to use the new MessageHistory API.
The `recall` command has been moved from Quotegrabs into MessageHistory. It
also now has the ability to ignore messages containing the recall command
itself, for improved usability.
Likewise, the `grab` command will now ignore previous `grab` commands when
grabbing by regex in order to prevent accidentally grabbing previous grab
attempts.
The `join` and `part` commands have been improved to accept multiple channels,
and `part` will use the current channel if none is provided.
AntiFlood: Correct use of ignore list
IgnoreList: Ignoring user without args now permanent instead of 5 mins
Save time when ignore expires instead of seconds remaining
Improve output of `ignore list` command for readability
bantracker: do not ban someone if their hostmask matches their +q mask
bantracker: remove ban timeouts on -q/-b
antiflood: unbanme will not work if manual ban/quiet set in place
