Spammers have recently hit GIMPnet, the IRC network which hosts many GNOME and Mono related projects. Only a few channels are affected: #gnome, #gimp, #gtk+, #pygtk and #mono. The spamming has forced us to set the invite only flag, which prevents the spam bots from entering the channels and thus avoiding the spam. The downside of this is that no new users can enter these channels.
However, there’s a workaround, if you want to enter any of these channels just ask our friendly bot dorito to invite you, which can be done by sending him a private message, in most clients you can do this by typing:
/msg dorito invite #channel
If everything goes well you’ll receive an invitation to the channel. This has to be done each time you login to the network.
A long term solution is being worked on, this is just a temporary workaround.
And what if the spammer who operates the botnet reads Planet GNOME?
I love GNOME desktop and it is the only desktop I used within last six years, during this time #GNOME channel been the worst IRC channel ever… for users