Omegle Group Chat, Revisited

by Jiang on Dec.10, 2009, under Computing, Hacks

Since the introduction of Omegle Group Chat, a netizen by the name of OmLeif (presumably Leif K-Brooks of Omegle) joined my IRC channel and expressed his dissatisfaction with both the spam bots and my solution. Although he declined to discuss his plans for improving Omegle, he did promise to work on the problems. We knew that change was afoot.

When I checked my chat bot this morning, I discovered that it was being subjected to reCAPTCHA challenges. This welcome change has drastically cut down the amount of spam seen on Omegle. While it appeared that Group Chat was no longer necessary (its original purpose was to create an oasis amidst the spam) or viable, those in my IRC channel asked for more. Knowing that Group Chat still had a place, I set out to rewrite the entire framework.

The fundamental changes are:

the bot no longer needs to maintain tens of simultaneous connections, since the spam rate is much lower
IRC support sits at the core of the system instead of having been added on as an afterthought
should the bot encounter a reCAPTCHA challenge, users present in the channel will be able to solve the challenge via the reCAPTCHA API

To see Group Chat in action, feel free to join #inportb on freenode. Or if you want, you might just luck out on Omegle… Have fun out there!

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