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Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

There have been months where the spam on freenode was unbearable, and fundamentally IRC is, like SMTP, a protocol where spammers have the advantage, and only heuristics stop spam.

A big part of the value of IRC-replacements are accounts that are tied enough to a person's identity (For example, by requiring sms confirmation) to deter most spam. IRC hasn't been able to do that.

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Doesn't IRC support the registration of usernames?

Most servers do, and a simple channel mode solves the spam problem (which isn't nowhere near as much of a problem as email spam).

I don't believe that it does. For a week or two about a year ago, freenode had a problem where accounts would join channel, spam links to sites accusing prominent people of child porn, and be kicked a moment later.

If there's a channel mode that can stop that, while still keeping the channel useful for people who need support, I couldn't find it.

Freenode channels can require users to be registered and identified in order to join. This solves the spam problem. Given that I am on Freenode 24/7 and have been for years, on 40+ channels, and spam has never been an issue I stand by my original comment.

The spammers were using unidentified nicks. The network has channel mode 'r', that is used for only allowing identified nicks into the channel.

I'm not really a fan of channel mode 'r' for support channels. Someone might join the channel for a simple question or two, they get the answers and never return. Having to register a nickname and check email can be a bit annoying for some people.

The network also has user mode 'R' that blocks messages from unidentified users.

They added a spam filter into the IRCd over a year ago.

https://freenode.net/kb/answer/channelmodes

https://freenode.net/kb/answer/usermodes

https://freenode.net/news/spamfilter

in my experience, even just setting +s to enforce TLS connections was enough to remove all spam.

In my experience of operating an IRC network, some channels hate to set +s because it hampers the channel's discoverability. Unlike +n, +s shouldn't be a norm.

Uppercase 'S' for TLS, lowercase 's' just hides the channel from /list and ALIS on freenode.

No.

Individual IRC server implementations might, but each implementation seems to be unique in how they handle it (maybe through a website, maybe through NickServ, maybe through AuthServ, maybe through yet another bot name, and login may or may not use the PASS command, etc.), and those implementations frequently have you jumping through brittle hoops to auth that break when you attempt to automate them due to timing issues etc. leaving you manually logging in every time.

Which is probably part of the reason why the IRC servers I can think of generally all allowed messaging without any kind of registration other than connecting and auto-choosing a unique-for-now nickname. IRC moderation then becomes an uncoordinated, individualized, constant game of whack-a-proxy, RBLs, etc.

https://ircv3.net/ solves that nicely.

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