Protect your nickname from abuse

When you are about to become part of a community, you usually choose your very own nickname. This nickname identifies you and is associated with your personality, so you may don’t want someone else to use this nickname.

Since IRC by design allows everyone to use any nickname that is currently not in use, we provide a service called NickServ to protect your nick from abuse.

Registering your nickname

To protect your nickname you need to register it. What you need for that is a valid e-mail address (e.g. [email protected]) and a secure password (e.g. s3cret) only you know.

Once you are connected to IRC with the nick you want to register, you can sign up with the following command:

/msg NickServ register s3cret [email protected]

Keep in mind that a password can’t contain whitespaces.

This would register your current nickname with the password “s3cret” to the e-mail address “[email protected]”.

Once you registered, you have to verify your e-mail address. So check your email mailbox for a new e-mail.

This email should contain a verification code you have to enter in your IRC client. An example can look like this:

/msg NickServ VERIFY REGISTER yournick nxavntjirsmm

Once you did that your account will stay until you don’t log in for more than 90 days. If you don’t verify your account, it expires automatically after 1 day and only provides a limited set of functionality.

We provide multiple ways to login to your account. The manual way is to use the following command:

/msg NickServ identify yournick s3rect

When s3cret is your password and yournick your nickname.

But many clients provide an authentification method called SASL. In Hexchat that’s the “Password” setting in the network edit window.

In WeeChat you can use the SASL settings for that.

Enforce your nickname is only for you

First of all, keep abusers away from your nickname. Everyone can verify you now by using the /whois command. There is a new line shown:

/whois yournick

…
* [yournick] is logged in as yournick
…

But people can maybe still use your nickname. To prevent this you can use the enforce setting which will automatically rename a user if he or she doesn’t identify to your account after 30 seconds. If you want to use these settings you should already setup your client to identify by itself, otherwise, you may annoy other people in channels because your nick is changed after connecting.

/msg NickServ SET ENFORCE ON

This should keep people away from using your nickname.

Free your nickname

When you don’t want to enforce your nick but join while someone is using yours, you may want to get rid of this person. That’s what the commands GHOST and RELEASE are made for.

RELEASE is the gentle way. It renames the user of your nickname to a generic nickname like “Guest15645” and can be used like this:

/msg NickServ RELEASE yournick s3cret

When yournick is the nickname you want to use and s3cret is your password

GHOST kills the other user and forces him or her to reconnect to the network. It’s especially useful when you meet a ghost, an old connection for your own client that is still alive. Some clients use this command automatically and free up your nickname this way.

/msg NickServ GHOST yournick s3cret

Here applies the same as above.

Reset your password

So another important question is how to get your password back when you lost it.

Since you have a verified e-mail address you can guess where a new password is sent? Right, directly to your email inbox!

/msg NickServ SENDPASS yournick

Where yournick is the nickname you have registered and need a new password for

Additional help

So all in all that are the most important commands. But there are more commands to explore and we provide a rich documentation for them.

Simply use the help command for NickServ:

/msg NickServ help

Summary

You should now be able to protect your identity on MadIRC and also get access to all IRC services we provide, like registering channels or getting an individual vhost.

All in all, that’s it! See you on MadIRC!