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Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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

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.

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.

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