Grenzland chat

The Grenzland chat server can be reached at host grenzland.club port 6667.

There are multiple web clients:

• Wilderland offers Convos and The Lounge
• Campaign Wiki offers The Lounge

IRC

The underlying technology is called internet relay chat (IRC). You can use any IRC client to connect!

For macOS and iOS: Colloquy or Palaver.

For Android: Revolution IRC. For the Linux console: irssi.

Universal chat apps like Pidgin or Adium for macOS are also possible, as are some mail clients like Thunderbird

Use the /list command to show the channels and join the ones that sound interesting.

XMPP or Jabber

You can access the same channels using your favourite XMPP client.

Join conversations using the format #welcome@irc.grenzland.club. Replace #welcome with other channel names like #talknix or #support.

For macOS and iOS: Monal. For Android: Conversations. For the Linux console: Profanity. For a GUI: Dino.

Role-Playing Games

Our games are announced via Norn, a bot.

See all games on our calendar.

Link blogs

Norn is also used to maintain a link blog. The important one for us are the Grenzland links.

Admins

The operator names and passwords are stored in /etc/ngircd/ngircd.conf of the various server participating in our network. Each server has their own operators. They are listed in the [Operator] sections. The operator username and password are different from regular account usernames and password on the server, and they are different from the nicknames people use to connect to the network. The operator username and password is used for the /OPER command to get the o mode. With it, you have more privileges.

Operators can ban people as follows:

# become an operator
/oper username password
# where is somebody connecting from (look for "Actual host")
/whois nick
# ban somebody on the entire network (timeout is in seconds, 0 is permanent, 600 s is 10 min)
/gline nick!user@hostmask timeout reason
# list global bans
/stat g

Other interesting commands:

# send a message to all users
/wallops message

Note for admins: please remember that nick length needs to be the same across the network!

See commands and modes for more.

Network

We use ngircd because it federates.

We increased the nick length:

MaxNickLength = 20

Topology:

• campaignwiki.org connects to wilderland.ovh on port 6697 using TLS
• grenzland.club connects to wilderland.ovh on port 6697 using TLS

Resilience: Provide multiple server sections with the same group ID. ngircd will try to connect to one of them and stop as soon as it worked.

For campaignwiki.org, for example:

[Global]
        Name = campaignwiki.org

# ...

[Server]
	Name = wilderland.ovh
	Host = wilderland.ovh
	Port = 6697
	SSLConnect = yes
	SSLVerify = no
	MyPassword = *secret A*
	PeerPassword = *secret B*
	Group = 1

[Server]
	Name = grenzland.club
	Host = grenzland.club
	Port = 6697
	SSLConnect = yes
	SSLVerify = no
	MyPassword = *secret C*
	PeerPassword = *secret D*
	Group = 1

All servers are in group 1.

Every connection is defined by a name and two passwords, “my” password and “the other password”. The ngircd server on the other side must provide them in reverse, of course.

For grenzland.club, for example:

[Global]
        Name = grenzland.club

# ...

[Server]
	Name = campaignwiki.org
	Host = campaignwiki.org
	Port = 6697
	SSLConnect = yes
	SSLVerify = yes
	MyPassword = *secret B*
	PeerPassword = *secret A*
	Group = 1