Flood (IRC)
With Flood (Engl. Flood) in is IRC sending to understand too much text in too little time. This is often undesirable. In the simplest case, the chat participant sends too many lines in a row without meaningful chatting. Usually a flood is created by inserting larger text blocks or ASCII art graphics, which exceeds the intended purpose and design of a chat. If larger texts are to be transmitted in a chat, paste services can be used. A flood can, however, also be a controlled flooding of an IRC server with the aim of paralyzing the attacked computer by overloading it.
Flood as an attack
Flooding is a technique similar to distributed denial of service . With DDoS, the same command is sent repeatedly to a computer in order to cause a crash. Entire IRC networks can be massively disrupted by DDoS attacks, i.e. flooding .
Flood in chat
Deliberate flooders also use programs such as so-called chat flooders , which send entered texts in a short time sequence. In this way, large amounts of data can be brought into a chat in a short time and thus disrupt it. The purpose of these floods is, for example, to annoy the other chat participants, provoke them and / or get them to leave the channel. In the event of severe floods, it is no longer possible to chat without appropriate protection, as your own messages and those of your chat partners can no longer be distinguished from spam.
Floods can put a considerable strain on the IRC servers , as they are already fully utilized for normal chat operations, especially in larger networks. Floods can also result in additional costs, for example for data traffic . Flooders are not tolerated for long in many chats and IRC networks, and the IRC operators , as well as the channel operators , usually quickly decide on a kick or ban , i.e. the forced exclusion of the flooder from the chat.
Most IRC daemons (e.g. UnrealIRCd ) have a built -in flood filter , also called anti-flooder or anti-spammer , which triggers an immediate G-line that bans the flooder from the entire IRC network . Since some flooding programs change their IP address and / or their user name almost every second by dialing in or proxy connections , this does not always offer effective protection. When registering, the familiar input of a number and / or letter code using a random image provides a remedy against new registrations (see also Captcha ).