Nickname Registration

Your nick is how peo­ple on freen­ode know you. If you reg­is­ter it, you'll be able to use the same nick over and over. If you don't reg­is­ter, some­one else may end up reg­is­ter­ing the nick you want. If you reg­is­ter and use the same nick, peo­ple will be­gin to know you by rep­u­ta­tion.

If a chan­nel is set to mode +r, you won't be able to join it un­less you are reg­is­tered and iden­ti­fied to Nick­Serv. If you try to join, you might be for­ward­ed to a dif­fer­ent chan­nel. If a chan­nel is set to qui­et un­reg­is­tered users (mode +q $~a), you won't be able to speak while on that chan­nel un­less you are reg­is­tered and iden­ti­fied. Both of these modes are used by some chan­nels to re­duce chan­nel ha­rass­ment and abuse.

Nickname Setup

The fol­low­ing steps are the rec­om­mend­ed method to reg­is­ter and set up a new freen­ode ac­count. If you have ques­tions or doubts about the process, a mem­ber of staff will be hap­py to dis­cuss it and an­swer any ques­tions you may have.

  1. Se­lect a per­ma­nent, mas­ter nick­name. If the nick­name you want is reg­is­tered but has ex­pired, just ask a staffer and in most cas­es, we will be hap­py to drop it for you. Please avoid us­ing the name of a com­mu­ni­ty project or trade­marked en­ti­ty, to avoid con­flicts. Write down your pass­word and be sure to keep the sheet of pa­per in a safe place.

  2. Reg­is­ter your IRC nick:

    /msg NickServ REGISTER password [email protected]

    Re­place pass­word with a se­cure, unguess­able pass­word that you keep se­cret.

    The email ad­dress that you se­lect will not be giv­en out by staff, and is main­ly used to al­low us to help you re­cov­er the ac­count in the event that you for­get your pass­word. For this rea­son, you are re­quired to use a real, non-dis­pos­able, email ad­dress. Upon reg­is­ter­ing, you will re­ceive an email with a ver­i­fi­ca­tion com­mand that you will need to run to com­plete the reg­is­tra­tion process. Fail­ure to ver­i­fy the ac­count will cause it to be au­to­mat­i­cal­ly dropped af­ter about 24 hours.

  3. It's use­ful, but not re­quired, to have an al­ter­nate nick grouped to your ac­count. For ex­am­ple, if your pri­ma­ry nick is foo:

    /nick foo_

    then iden­ti­fy to your pri­ma­ry ac­count:

    /msg NickServ IDENTIFY foo password

    and fi­nal­ly, group the new nick to your ac­count

    /msg NickServ GROUP

    We pre­fer you to use just one ac­count, and group nicks to it as de­scribed above, rather than reg­is­ter­ing for mul­ti­ple ac­counts. Group­ing nicks in this way gives you the ben­e­fit of hav­ing all your nicks cov­ered by the same cloak, should you choose to wear a cloak. The ex­cep­tion to this is where you might want to run a bot. You should reg­is­ter a sep­a­rate ac­count for your bot.

Logging In

You'll need to log in to your nick­name each time you re­con­nect to freen­ode.

The sim­plest, and most ro­bust, way to do this is to con­fig­ure SASL, if your client sup­ports it. If not, you can sup­ply your lo­gin de­tails, in the form <account>:<password>, as a serv­er pass­word and they will be for­ward­ed to Nick­Serv when you fin­ish con­nect­ing. For ex­am­ple:

/connect chat.freenode.net 6667 mquin:uwhY8wgzWw22-zXs.M39p

Nickname Expiry

Reg­is­tered nick­names and ac­counts will ex­pire if they're not used for a long time, af­ter which they'll be avail­able for an­oth­er user to take over. See our poli­cies for de­tails of when this oc­curs.

While nick­names and ac­counts do not au­to­mat­i­cal­ly get delet­ed when they ex­pire -- only when an­oth­er user re­quests to take over the reg­is­tra­tion -- we do oc­ca­sion­al­ly per­form clean-up runs on the ser­vices data­base, in which we will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly drop all reg­is­tra­tions which have been idle for a long time. When we do this, we set the thresh­old for dele­tion con­sid­er­ably high­er than the doc­u­ment­ed ex­piry time, to en­sure that users close to the lim­it do not lose out.