ARTICLE

How to not get banned on Freenode

by | Tue 10 Oct 2006

IRC is pretty important to my job. I spend all day, every day on it, talking to the community and working on various things.

Today I wanted to double check my `/away` was working, so I figured I would log on twice, join a random channel and test it. So, I logged on as `jono` and `jono_` and then joined a random channel – I joined `#asdfg`.

Bad move. I got message saying I had been *D-Lined*. I was not sure what this mean’t but it clearly mean’t *ahha! no IRC for you sucka!*

Luckily, the awesome Ubuntu community came to my rescue and I almost immediately got an email from Melissa and a few seconds later David Symons called me and was trying to straighten it out with the Freenode admins. Thanks guys. Also thanks to Freenoder denny (an old flame from the Linux UK days) for helping too. 🙂

I cannot believe that there is a channel that can be accidentally joined by typing in a bunch of consecutive keys next to each other on a keyboard and it bans you. I could understand if I needed to join `#q1gcyh75fdr5g6h7`, but this is nuts.

I am currently awaiting a Freenode admin to wake up and un-ban me – I am now using an SSH tunnel to get at IRC. Would be nice if Freenode had network people awake during the day in my timezone to fix things like this.

So, whatever you do, *never join #asdfg*!

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