Using NickServ
NickServ is an important aspect of IRC, particularly for admins and the Layonara GM Team. NickServ helps to protect your nickname from abuse and also protects it from being stolen by malicious folk. Granted Layonara hasn’t seen much nickname abuse but that’s no reason to not take precautions. It’s better to be safe than sorry they say.
So, how do we use NickServ? We’ll, without forcing everyone to read up on all of NickServ’s capabilities via it’s documentation, let’s walk though how to do the basics.
What are the basics though? This boils down to two things, registering your nickname (and linking any alternate nicknames) and setting up your client to automatically identify yourself with NickServ when you login to the IRC server. So, let’s look at the first part; registering your nickname.
To register your current nickname with NickServ, type the following from any tab in your IRC client:
/msg NickServ REGISTER yourpassword your.email@address
In the above command, you’re sending a private message to NickServ, telling it you want to REGISTER your current nickname with yourpassword (which should be something of your choosing of course) using your.email@address (which of course should be your real email address). NickServ will then send out an email immediately. Within this email will be an authorization code. Once you get that, type the following (again from any tab in your IRC client):
/msg NickServ AUTH yourauthcode
Once that’s complete you will now have registered your nickname with NickServ and elevated your coolness factor in my books! hehe
So how do we identify ourselves with NickServ when we login to IRC automatically? Let’s look at the manual way of doing things first. To identify ourselves with NickServ, type the following:
/msg NickServ IDENTIFY yourpassword
That will identify yourself with NickServ and all should be well at that point. If you login to IRC using a nickname registered with NickServ but don’t identify yourself within a few minutes; NickServ will kick you from IRC rather forcefully. Do this too many times and you’ll get yourself auto-banned for a day. Thus, it’s important to have your client auto-identify yourself or for you to manually identify yourself immediately after loggin into IRC.
So how do we setup an IRC client to automatically identify on login? Well that’s a complicated question because every IRC client is different. Some make it easy, others make it rather difficult. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to stick to two (easy) examples.
- Layonara’s IRC Web Client: Simply put your NickServ password into the password field provided on the login page and you’re good to go!
- X-Chat: In your server settings for the Layonara IRC server within X-Chat find the field labeled Command and put the following in there (note the lack of the starting “/”):
msg NickServ IDENTIFY yourpassword
At some point in the future I plan on making up some detailed pages on this site, one page per client, detailing how to set the client up from scratch for use with Layonara as well as how to gear things to automatically identify yourself with NickServ when you connect. For now though, those details are beyond the scope of this post (which has already gotten rather lengthy).
Now, typically, people use more than one nickname in IRC. Sometimes this is due to reconnecting after being disconnected when there’s a network disruption or when you just want to let people know something about your current status. For instance sometimes people are logged into two places at once, at home where they use their normal nickname and then from work where they use something like nickname_work. So, instead of registering each nickname with NickServ, we should be using the LINK feature of NickServ.
While logged in (and identified with NickServ) as your registered nickname, type the following:
/msg NickServ LINK alt_nickname
This will link your alternate nickname to your registered account with NickServ. From that point forward you can login with either nickname using the same NickServ password and both nicknames can be logged in at the same time. Vunderbar!
Anyways, I hope this post has helped clear up some of the mystery, smoke and mirrors behind NickServ and IRC in general.
Enjoy!
