The Complete History Of WinMX - Part 5

We have now reached the most popular time in WinMX history where many of its old school users first met up with the 9th wonder of the world and its friendly community.
Version 3.31 was to be the longest serving version ever released serving a full 20 months before any further releases where seen.

WinMX 3.31 Release Announcement From the Internet Archive

Find WinMX 3.31 release in WinMXWorld Archive

In some quarters this delay in repairing some of the newly found exploits of the time was met with anger and frustration and many of the well known third party developers had by now appeared on the scene to create third party chat clients, robots and all manner of ancillary programs as well as some crucial third party patches that put a halt to many of the exploits that where causing disruption within the community

One of the more well know annoyances to hit the chat userbase was when the hugely popular RCMS program was found to firstly have a backdoor and secondly found to be susceptible to other well know attacks involving a program called Nushi Poison that did exactly as it's name suggests, poisoning the RCMS plugin based winmx chat rooms in various ways.
Nushi the Japanese programmer and creator of the RCMS Server plugin released one of many updates to his program and apologised for the backdoor explaining how he had used it to have fun with his friends and was upset that it was now a source of abuse to room hosts, however those behind Nushi Poison continued to also update their attack tool and at one stage many chat hosts had taken to hex editing their RCMS versions and keeping the new command stings secret to prevent remote abuse, with the rise of many stand alone chat servers offering fresh features and no such attack problems this once popular program started its decline.

Another attack tool to hit the popular conciousness was one created by King Macro called simply "Chat Attack", this tool was command line operated with no fancy user interface but instead used simple text input selection of the range of annoyances from a text list, it must be said at this point that King Macro stated he was using this tool as a test instrument for his own chat server development and there is some evidence of this as he indeed did release many server versions, however many have been sceptical that one of his compatriots was soley responsible for the public release of the tool as most developers dont often go so far in making a tool of this sort when they could trivially patch all of the potential exploits once they where aware of them, I leave this up to the reader to contemplate.    

To deal with some of the problems encountered by long terms users of the WinMX software a new beta  version was released and took the community by suprise as many had given up hope of seeing anything further from frontcode, version 3.52 Beta 1 was launched on the 13th of June 2004

Changes in v3.52 beta 1

- Completely new channel hosting engine, with a new full set of channel admin commands and capabilities.  A full list is included with the WinMX v3.52 beta download, or can be viewed online here.
- Channel window features new multi-color edit control to replace RichEdit.  Improved backscroll and selection properties.  Right-clicking user name in text provides context menu.  Double-click types name in input window.
- Channel text entry window features backscroll using up and down arrows.
- Improved channel redirect characteristics.  Will not part from originating channel until new channel has been successfully joined.  Redirected clients pass referring channel name to destination channel before entry (in case the destination chooses to not allow all referrers.)
- Channel list has local filter bar.  Channels will only display if they contain the text you enter in this space (cAsE insensitive.)
- Multi-sel ignore list.
- Whois and browse icons indicate operation status.

On the same day as Beta 1 was released Beta 2 quickly followed.

Changes in v3.52 beta 2

- Corrected a browse window problem found in beta 1
- Commands /level_dispop and /level_dispvoice limits increased to 255 so the host may remain unknown

WinMX 3.52 Beta 3 was released the following day (14th of June) many of the users where happy to see the old familiar pattern of fast and regular updates and felt once again that they where being listened to in the shape of the feedback they where delivering to Frontcode.  

Changes in v3.52 beta 3

- fixed bug allowing host kick/ban
- fixed bug around the handling of bans and channel connections from loopback interface
- several new commands for setting auth levels, watching other admin's commands, messaging channel ops
- /kickall command enhanced
- added kick/ban access level margin
- users with + or @ as first char in name will display with leading underscore in channel.
- channel search algorithm changed slightly
- fixed MBCS channel name problems
- minor channel text selection bug fixed
- minor channel text display bugs fixed
- new feature in channel command menu allows you to keep window open after channel connection lost and re-join later

Two days later users where treated to a further release (3.52 Beta 4)

Changes in v3.52 beta 4

- fixed channel window display bug that altered certain MBCS combinations
- fixed /setchannelname parameter validation
- exit button in channel when hosting has confirmation
- channel list improved sorting
- channel name can be typed directly into list search bar and pressing enter will attempt join, both for WPNP and OpenNap
- usernames that don't have <brackets> can also be r-clicked and d-clicked for same behavior
- added many new commands (see wpnpchannelcmds.txt for details): level_override_watchcmdsfilter  level_view_ownlevelchange  level_view_alllevelchange  level_view_maxlevelchange  level_view_ownlevelchangeanon  level_view_alllevelchangeanon  level_view_maxlevelchangeanon  level_view_kick level_view_kickanon  level_view_kickmaxlevel  level_view_ban level_view_banduration level_view_bananon level_view_banmaxlevel level_auth_setchannelvisible setchannelvisible channelname

After a further two days (18th) users welcomed another release (WinMX 3.52 beta 5),

Changes in v3.52 beta 5

- minor layout changes in channel list window
- /me display problems
- unban by ip crash fixed
- added /clearlogins and /level_auth_clearlogins
- savecfg will put a /clearlogins just above logins in cfg file
- added /level_view_adminflaggedmsg and /level_view_adminflaggedmsgthresh
- process \n in MOTD
- single char channels now visible in list
- favorite channels system
- manual join case insensitive on address chars for wpnp channels
- can create channel by cfg #
- whois icon missing in beta 4 fixed
- topic or channel name change only generates notification to users other than caller if topic or channel name actually different
- auto-scroll while selecting text in channel display window
- shift key assisted text selection in channel text display
- /lslogin will not show logins with access level above caller

The rapid fire speed of delivery seemed to set a very fast paced pattern of releases in the minds of many users but it was not to a continuous process, the next release was on the 24th of June (3.52 Beta 6)

Changes in v3.52 beta 6

- word-wrapping routines re-written to improve speed with large backscroll
- raw watchcmds only shows /action when no output visible otherwise
- WPNP core protocol improvements
- removed /clear command (too ambiguous)
- added /clr to clear channel output window quickly
- fixed scroll not reset when clear bug
- fixed banip not recognizing certain characters or IP address strings
- channel cfg file line length limit increased to accommodate large MOTDs
- channel /login attempts rate-limited to 4 in 30 seconds and 15 in 10 minutes
- un-modalized all channel/channel list popup dialogs
- host button behavior changed in channel list
- added /level_view_longusernames (defaults to 255)
- added full set of advanced admin commands to channel menu

This was followed the following day by the Beta 7 Build

Changes in v3.52 beta 7

- corrected word-wrapping bugs
- channel command menus re-organized
- option to filter channel list including topics
- option to suppress initial channel fetch
- can join channels with IP:port  (eg.  channelname_192.168.1.101:6699 )
- added commands:  /allowincomingredirect  /level_auth_allowincomingredirect  /level_view_longusernamechanges  /log

And finally the last of the 3.52 series (Beta 8) was released on the next day, the 26th of June.

Changes in v3.52 beta 8

- channel window caches parted user info, so right-clicking on a username in text area will still produce a full menu even after the user has left the channel
- WPNP channel host now caches IPs of users after they part channel for banning purposes
- WPNP kick/ban internals re-coded
- fixed several minor channel text selection bugs
- ctrl-insert will put highlighted text into channel input area
- added /motd command
- fixed channel "hold window open" setting persistence bug
- channel list topic filter now case insensitive

WinMX 3.52 Beta Testing Announcement From the Internet Archive

Find WinMX 3.52 "BETA" series the in WinMXWorld Archive


We have reached the next "proper" release in the series WinMX 3.53, this was released on the 2nd of June 2004 and all was good with the world.

WinMX 3.53 Release Announcement From the Internet Archive

Find WinMX 3.53 release in WinMXWorld Archive