Short introduction to ratbox-services for users

IRC services are facilities to register channels (so it can be controlled easily who gets ops in the channel) and nicknames (so you can get back your nickname if someone else is using it) and to give the IRC operators more control over the network.

Note: your network may have disabled nickname registration.

To simplify things, ratbox-services requires a username registration to register nicknames or channels. Only username registration have passwords. Note that this "username" has no relation to what's displayed before the @ in /whois or similar.

The services appear as fake users, with names usually ending in *Serv. The most frequently used ones are called UserServ, ChanServ and NickServ, managing usernames, channels and nicknames respectively. General information can be obtained with /msg <service> help; for information on a specific command, use /msg <service> help <command>.

Usernames, channels and nicknames can be registered with the REGISTER command of the respective service. For usernames this is:

/msg userserv register <username> <password> <emailaddress>

You can choose the password yourself; it should not be equal to any "important" password. It is probably a good idea to save the password in a safe place.

To login later: (it can be useful to configure your client to do this automatically on connect)

/msg userserv login <username> <password>

To register a channel, you need to have ops (@) in it and you must be logged in with userserv; also it must not be registered yet. Then:

/msg chanserv register <#channel>

You can then add users with:

/msg chanserv adduser <#channel> <username> <level>

<level> is 1 for a voice, 50 for an op, 190 for a co-founder, see /msg chanserv help moduser for more information. <username> may be the registered username of the user or =<nickname> for the username that nickname is currently logged in as. You may add OP or VOICE at the end of the command to issue that mode automatically on join; OP only works if the level is 50 or more. To change existing users, use the moduser and modauto commands. Users can be listed with the listusers command. To remove a user, do /msg chanserv deluser <#channel> <username>. If you remove all users (yourself last) the channel registration is dropped.

Several options can be set with

/msg chanserv set <#channel> <option> <value>

such as autojoin which makes chanserv join your channel so it will not disappear if the last user leaves (unless services crashes or reboots).

More regularly used ChanServ commands are:

/msg chanserv invite <#channel> /msg chanserv op <#channel> /msg chanserv voice <#channel>

To register your current nick under your current username:

/msg nickserv register

NickServ will warn users using your nick without logging in and can remove clients using your nick from the network on request. This is done with /msg nickserv release <nickname> or /msg nickserv regain <nickname>; the latter also changes your nickname to the given one which is very useful if the user using your nickname reconnects.

-- Jilles Tjoelker jilles-AT-stack.nl rserv-userintro.txt 1.0, 20050605