IRC Password: Resetting One and Recovering a Lost Nick

Some of the IRC networks, like freenode, are trying to keep spammers out by requiring nickname registration. What if you forget it? Here’s how to reset one you’ve forgotten, and how to snag one that someone’s been camping on.

I lost an IRC password lately, and had to reset it. But there’s a bit of back story…

I’ve been craigbass76 for quite a while on the freenode IRC network. Someone had it (someone who played bass, or fished, and was born in 1976 I’m guessing) before me, so I used craigbass1976 for a few years. But I started wondering about getting craigbass76 as a nickname, since I had it on so many other networks, and figured someone was either camping on the nick, or registered it once and just forgot about it. So, to grab it, I ran this:

/msg nickserv help regain

But then for some reason (I switched to a different Linux version, wiped a computer and lost it, or maybe went from XChat to HexChat) I forgot my password. It wasn’t a big deal until freenode required a password before I could get into several of the rooms they have running (#mysql, #fedora, etc.)

As long as we have a valid email address, we can just run this to start the process of resetting a lost IRC password for a username we “own” already:

/nickserv help sendpass