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.
Hey, here at BNC4FREE, we’ve been working to improve our existing services and ensure that a quality service is presented and used by all of our customers and clients. In an attempt to better our services, we have some proposed server changes taking place this weekend.
Our current server hosted in Texas by Alex is being removed for reasons that he and i would prefer not to disclose. We will however be moving all users and accounts onto a brand new server in Illnois hosted by me (Russell). The move will most likely occur on the 1st November 2009 and will take roughly an hour. The server will be offline for this period of time.
We applologize for any inconvience that this change causes but we will try to rectify any immediate issues as soon as is possible. All user account data and passwords will be retained as it was on the Texas server after the move has been completed. Hostnames will be updated so that the old hostname points to our new server however we strongly advise that you use il.us.bnc4free.com after the move.
With regards to client and server pings, this move shouldn’t affect pings or lattency too much, however you might notice around a 10 - 20 ms difference on some servers.
We aim to make this transition as smooth as possible however there may be some problems. If you encouter any problems after the move then please contact us on IRC. More Updates will be posted here once the move is done.
Thanks
[UPDATE]: The server move is now completed, all the users on tx.us.bnc4free.com need to reconnect on il.us.bnc4free.com - We were also made aware that some of you were still using our NL hostnames (nl.eu.bnc4free.com), this has also been changed to il.us.bnc4free.com - Please update your records!
We have recently noticed that we have alot of bnc’s on our servers and this has been causing some excessive delay when users have tried to reconnect to servers and made the connections very laggy. In order to resolve this we have deleted any bnc’s that havent been accessed via IRC since the beggining of September. The lag issues should now be resolved seeing as we deleted over 20 BNC’s on the server that was lagging the most and numerous other bnc’s on our other servers.
If your account has been deleted, you are free to request a new one but please be active!! Inactive accounts are a waste of our resources. Please remember that this is a free service and that the servers are paid for by donations and the staff themselves.
We also have a new forum board which has kindly been providided by staff at the XtremeGeek IRC Network ofwhich the BNC4FREE Staff will use to deal with any support or issues you have with your accounts aswell as answer any questions you may have. The forum can be accessed by clicking here
Over the last few days and weeks we’ve been monitoring all of our clients and the locations they come from. BNC4FREE seems to have expanded alot recently and we would like to accomodate some of our non-english clients more. In order to this we have planned to have this site translating into more languages. These languages are:
- Dutch
- Portugese
- French
- German
- English
We are currently in the process of finding people that live locally in these countries and know the native languages and english to translate the site as best as possible to the respective languages.
We are also still completing our brand new webpanel which will hopefully be completed by November and we will be opening up a web request system which will allow users to request from our site! If you have any problems in the mean-time please feel free to drop by IRC by using our webchat and one of the support team will assist you.
Thanks for using BNC4FREE!
BNC4FREE has been expanding its services over the last few months in order to be able to provide more free IRC bouncers to the public. The expansion involved creating an official channel at the rizon network, massively updating this website and investing in 2 more servers. This is set to continue!
In the next few months, BNC4FREE will be launching a brand new webpanel where users can edit their accounts and admins can review everything without the need to use multiple webpanels! We will also be able to track users that are using multiple accounts more easily with the new panel and we are also implementing a proxy detection system and our very own blacklist. We have also noticed that there is a high demand for IRC bouncers on Rizon and GTANetwork, with this being the case we do have plans to grab a few more ip’s and funny hostnames to resolve the session limit issues. A new server in the netherlands has also been considered to resolve the issue.
In more recent news, the management have decided to remove Michael-TV from the staff team seeing as we currently have enough staff to deal with the amount of IRC Bouncers we currently have. We also welcome back an old BNC4FREE Staff member, Bernardo who will be able to help with your general questions and queries.
We have also bought the bnc4free.com which means you can now access the site and our servers by using bnc4free.com instead of bnc4free.info. In December 2009 we will be abandoning bnc4free.info and using bnc4free.com so we advise you get in the habit of using it sooner rather than later. All of the server and site addresses on our original domain also exist on .com. To make that simple for you, tx.us.bnc4free.info would be tx.us.bnc4free.com and so on…
We’d like to thank everyone that currently uses BNC4FREE and hope you enjoy the quality of the free service we provide. More Updates soon!
Recently we have made several changes to our request system. We now offer requests on irc.rizon.net and irc.xtremegeek.net.
In other news we have made a series of staff changes to handle requests and other admin related functions. The staff list is as follows:
- Russell - Management/Staff - Rizon/XtremeGeek - Access to all servers
- Josh - Management/Staff - Rizon/XtremeGeek - Access to all servers
- Sandro - Management/Staff - Rizon/XtremeGeek - Access to all servers
- Freelog - Support/Staff - Rizon/XtremeGeek - Access to PA
- Michael-TV - Support/Staff - XtremeGeek - Access to NL
In addition to our staff changes, we also have a new server in texas (tx.us.bnc4free.info) which has been kindly provided by Sandro. This will hopefully even the loads on all of our servers and help with session limits at Rizon which we have had previous issue’s with.
With regards to some downtime in August on all of our servers, i appologize on behalf of the staff. This was mainly caused by server upgrades and a routing problem with our UK server. This will hopefully not be a problem in September.
In the near future, we will be offering bnc’s via the web which means you can fill out a form on our site to request a bnc account. If you already have a bnc and need some help, feel free to drop by on irc.xtremegeek.net - #bnc4free or email us.
After disputes with the management of TriCore Hosting, the staff at bnc4free have decided that BNC4FREE will not be related to tricore. In addition to these, we have purchased our own server which is now running the UK bnc which is alot more stable than our original one in pensyllvania.
In other news we sadly say goodbye to Bernardo, who is now working with TriCore and other agencies however Josh is still on our staff team should you need any support.
Our policy for IRC Bouncers has been updated and each user is now permitted to have 3 bnc’s. Please review the Policy page on this site for more information on our terms and conditions.
In order for BNC4FREE to remain a completly free service, we kindly ask our clients to donate. Information on this can be found on our Donations page.
If you have any queries or questions regarding our services, feel free to contact us via IRC at irc.xtremegeek.net #bnc4free or use or webchat page.
Last week our services which include, SHELL4FREE, BNC4FREE and TechVision have all been merged into TriCore Hosting. The free bnc service will continue for now but it is likely that we will be making changes to the service to comply with the regulations and policies that are set by TriCore Hosting.
Despite the fact we have merged with the new service, our service will continue to run as near as the same standards we had before. This excludes the issue’s with the server in Pensyllvania ofwhich we believe we have found the cause of the problem. If the problems continue it is likely the server will be down for roughly an hour while we reset it however we hope this wont be necessary.
In other news our UK server is now a permanant server which means we wont be getting rid of it anytime soon and is provided by me. I’ll personally try to keep downtime at a minimum and clients in europe will find this server much better than our others. Our temporary server in Illnois will be expiring this week and due to issue’s with our server provider it will be discontinued however our servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Pensyllvania will continue to run.
This finally brings me onto an important update. We have renamed our original UK server to NL since we have discovered it may be hosted in the netherlands. There is some dispute that the information we have is incorrect and that it could be infact in the UK but the server address is now nl.eu.bnc4free.info instead of the original uk.eu.bnc4free.info. Our newest UK server can be found at uk.eu.bnc4free.info as of the 1st of August.
After alot of work and several changes we made to our systems, the server in Pennsylvania is now believed to be stable and working correctly however we will be upgrading the system over the next few weeks which will result in some minor downtime.
The changes we are enforcing will affect everyone and we have ordered some new servers in California, Germany and the United Kingdom to resolve users in europe and some parts of america that are expeirencing incredible lag. These servers will be up and running by mid-august and a server in Chicago is already undergoing testing with our latest version of the BNC.
The new version of our BNC server will fix a number of issues that currently exist including:
* The random crashes which were caused when spooling and destroying connections
* Built-In donator option which will allow the changing of servers
* Security Implementation: The BNC wont run if it isnt in our global allow list (on a remote server)
* Away Module that used to cause issues with encryption has been removed
With these updates, we are also changing our request system and our vhost changing system. This will mean that requests are likely be delayed for 1 or 2 weeks depending on whether the new system will actually work or not. Staff will be constantly working on improving the service so support may be limited during this period but we will try our best.
Secondly we’d like to announce that TechVision will be starting webhosting at the start of September. The webpanel we’ve implemented and a number of systems are currently being tested. At the same time we’ve been looking into the possibility’s of offering shell accounts but havent yet decided how this will work. As you can imagine this is all taking up alot of our staff member’s time so support and requests may take us a while to process. We can assure you that by September/October services will be running as normal.
Recently the server we own in Pennsylvania has been very unstable however the bouncer itself is not unstable. The server we host the bouncer on has been unstable since we re-imaged it. Although we are certain that we know what the problem is, resolving it has been difficult and we are still not entirely sure that we have fixed it. The server is likely to be unstable for the next week however existing users can request to moved onto our servers in the netherlands and california which are currently stable and running.
In other news, we have recently discussed the possibility of running a server in the UK. This will hopefully be running by next week if all goes to plan. We did originally buy a server to run a bouncer in Chicago but having discussed the plan with other staff we have now decided to abandon that plan however our other service (TechVision) will be providing webhosting using the server in chicago starting during August 2009.
Since the server was re-imaged, We’ve been spending masses of time trying to fix things and we are still working to fix any outstanding problems. Once again, sorry for the inconvience caused.
News | Russell Bradford | 
June 13, 2010 11:56 am | 
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