BNC4FREE is looking for New Staff with Potential, Dedication and Motivation!

BNC4FREE’s Summer Upgrade is coming up shortly and there will be alot of new features on our bnc’s. It may be quite noticable that there is a lack of staff already within BNC4FREE (3 people), so i’ve decided to open up some form of staff applications.

All the information you’ll need to successfully submit your application can be found at http://forum.bnc4free.com/index.php/topic,51.0.html

We wish you the best of luck!

Summer Upgrade Dates Confirmed

The dates for the summer upgrade have now been set and are final. ALL SERVERS will be down for a maximum of 2 hours at some point during the upgrade. The schedule for downtime is as follows:

AUGUST 2010

You can review the full list of updates/upgrades here

Summer Upgrade

If you were around for Christmas 2009, you’ll remember that we did a massive upgrade on all our servers and services in the space of about 4 days. Thats right, its happening again this summer. The date has not yet been set but there will be lots of changes!

For more information on this upgrade, please read http://forum.bnc4free.com/index.php/topic,22.0.html which has all the information you’ll need!

Webpanel Update & BNC4FREE Services Bot Update

So we’ve recently changed the BNC4FREE Webpanel theme to look a bit more ‘bright’ opposed to that dull and boring theme we had before. You will also notice that when you first access the webpanel, you won’t be asked for a username and password!

Instead, there is now a login button on the left side which can be used to access your account. In the near future we’ll be posting planned maintenance/upgrades on the homepage of the webpanel and listing the staff that are assigned to the server you are on in the orange box at the bottom of the page. We feel this will ensure that users are aware of the maintenance and plans we will be carrying out on specific servers and also make users aware of which staff are assigned to support each server. This should in theory mean quicker support times.

On IRC, we’ve been attempting to upgrade our Services Bot and this has caused a variety of downtime and issues while requesting new bnc’s. We believe that a couple of users probably didnt recieve the emails with their bnc details in them and in a few cases, the email was sent but the account wasnt added to the bnc. If this is the case, please post a message below with your request id and state whether you recieved the email of the bnc is claiming the details are invalid. We’ll be able to fix the problem quicker this way. As of now, we believe the bot is working correctly after today’s latest bugfix.

More news on the way soon - Thanks for using BNC4FREE!

New Servers!

BNC4FREE has just bought 2 brand new servers! There should no longer be session limit problems or problems connecting to networks because of limits as we have also purchased 10 ip’s on nl.eu.bnc4free.com. The following new servers have been added:

During the summer will be carrying out maintenance on ALL servers and this may mean there is some downtime on 1 or 2 days. Information regarding the maintenance and downtime will be posted here, on the BNC4FREE Forum and on Our Twitter.

Thanks for using BNC4FREE!

Merge with SDXHost/ConnectTek was just a plan to take us down!

Yesterday we merged our network (SurgeHost) with 2 existing network SDXHost and ConnectTek. I’ve personally been an administrator on the ConnectTek Network and knew a majority of people from SDXHost. Not even 24 hours after we merged, the network founder and also BNC4FREE Support Staff Member (Brenden), decided to remove our servers and myself from the network for reasons that have not yet been established. By doing this they successfully gained our users from BNC4FREE on SurgeHost ofwhich some of them are still there.

The channel that was owned in ConnectTek (#bnc4free) has been set to invite only by Brenden who has now been removed from our staff team. This network is no longer classified as official due to its abusive actions and what appears to be a plan to take us down. You can alternatively join one of the following official networks:

BNC4FREE appologies for this extreme inconvienence and hopes that you can understand the circumstances. We look forward to seeing you again soon!

SurgeHost, SDXHost and ConnectTek Merged

In the past few months we have had our services bot on SDXHost, SurgeHost and ConnectTek where you have been able to request your free bnc’s and gain support. On Saturday 19th June 2010, SDXHost and SurgeHost have merged with ConnectTek. You will now need to connect to irc.connecttek.net to request your Free BNC or one of our other official networks.

ConnectTek is where all of our staff are most active so your best trying this network if you are in need of support.

Support Forum Launched

BNC4FREE would like to inform all its users that we now have a support forum ofwhich you can gain information about our services, post your problems, idea’s and suggestions, ban appeals and more. You can visit the forum at http://forum.bnc4free.com/.

BNC4FREE has also been on Twitter for some considerable time and some of our updates are posted there even if they are not posted here, you can find us by going on Twitter and search for ‘BNC4FREE’ or you can find us directly by visiting http://twitter.com/BNC4FREE.

BNC4FREE has recent inherited a server in Toronto, CA and may soon have a bnc server on it. We’ve realised that some users that live in europe are on servers in the united states and vice-verser so throughout the summer we will be giving users the oppertunity to switch to a server nearer to them (session limit permitting).

BNC4FREE would like to inform all BNC users on UnderNet (irc.undernet.org) that there have been considerable issues lately with connection throttling on some servers which has resulted in K-Lines. These are usually started by failing to send a Challenge Response. Please can you either make sure that your BNC’s default nickname isnt the same as you registered one of make use of the ‘perform’ module which can be loaded by using ‘/bnc loadmod perform’ and then add your authentication details. Use ‘/msg *perform help’ for information.

Revival and Updates!

BNC4FREE has lacked some dedicated and commited staff lately and this has led to the service becoming very un-reliable and buggy. As owner and founder of the service, i personally do not like seeing the service so un-reliable and unsupported and will admit that i havent been paying full attention to it myself. However, BNC4FREE is going to remain a free service for many more years and i am determined to revive the service back it to its stable and reliable state. I have already anticipated that this may take some time due to the fact the staff are inactive for one reason or another. The plan of action is generally as outlined below:

All servers are going to be closely monitored and checked for reliability. If a server fails, please can you report it to Russell via Private Message in #bnc4free on our main irc network (irc.surgehost.net). This helps to find patterns in its crashes or buggy periods and also informs us sooner rather than later. If any servers are seen to be continously failing, we will make arrangements to buy a new server and move all users from the buggy or faulty server onto the new server. Users will be contact via email in the event of this occuring.

Note: With regards to il.us.bnc4free.com and dk.eu.bnc4free.com, some of the user data was lost from both of these servers and we only have backups from February/March. We do appologize for this and this is due to lack of monitoring on our part. We will be restoring the backup of il.us.bnc4free.com onto our new server (tx.us.bnc4free.com) during the course of this week. All users that were on this bnc will be emailed informing them of the change. With regards to pa.us.bnc4free.com, we have had some news on whats causing our dedicated server to crash from 1and1’s Data Centre Team. Some of the users on this BNC will be moved to improve the entire servers stability. The relevant users will be emailed when this change occurs.

This week we will be opening staff applications ofwhich will be reviewed daily. Applicants that we feel would make good staff members will be immediatly placed on the staff team and monitored until we are sure that they can be trusted and dedicated to their staff position. Staff will be expected to help everyone involved with BNC4FREE and monitor the servers usages to prevent abuse.

BNC4FREE Operates on a few networks ofwhich we expect users that currently have a bnc with us to idle on. Currently, there are not many users abiding by this very small and simple rule. We dont ask for much, so it would be nice if you could just respect this rule and idle on the channel that we ask you to idle on as per our Terms and Conditions. You can currently idle in #bnc4free on the following IRC Networks:

If you are idling on this channel on any other network, it does not count as abiding by our terms and conditions! So make sure you are one of the above networks!!

BNC4FREE is currently looking for someone that Dutch that can finish translating our dutch version of the site at bnc4free.nl. The help would be much appreciated and rewards will be given to those that help! Contact russell[at]bnc4free.com if you think your the one that could do this.

Over the next few weeks, we will be introducing a few new servers and reviewing the whole way that bnc4free works. We will also be introducing web and email requests and upgrading our servers throughout the next few months. If you have any suggestions for BNC4FREE, you can email me at russell[at]bnc4free.com and it will be considered and looked into.

More Updates and Information will be posted pretty much daily so keep your eyes open and check back soon!

Further Problems…

Some of you may have noticed that our downtime is still ongoing with a couple of our servers. Today’s unlucky server is de.eu.bnc4free.com which seems to be down. This is due to the VPS that were running the server on terminating itself for some unknown reason. In conjuction with that problem, we’ve attempted to restart the VPS 3 times ofwhich is also failing.

So your probably wondering after the recent masses of downtime, is this problem going to be resolved or get any better? The truth…. yes it is! We have decided after the recent problems with il.us.bnc4free.com and de.eu.bnc4free.com which both happen to be on the same VPS Provider, that we are moving both servers. We currently have plans in place to move de.eu.bnc4free.com onto a VPS in Atlanta (U.S) during the course of this week. All accounts and data will be saved and transferred onto the new server. It’ll be like we never moved it! The only difference will be the hostname used to connect to the server ofwhich all users will be emailed of the changes where applicable.

In addition to the previous news about il.us.bnc4free.com, we have already resolved the issue with that server by moving it onto a VPS that we have in Denmark which has been kindly provided by Thomas. Due to a lack of backups on our part, we were unable to ensure that every account was transferred to the new server but we have managed to keep all the accounts that existed on il.us.bnc4free.com before 07/02/2010 and transferred them onto our new server accordingly. Users from il.us.bnc4free.com are now able to connect to dk.eu.bnc4free.com on the usual ports.

More updates will be posted throughout this week so please check back often!