Firstly, please don't come straight to the Blitzed admins demanding that we ban the person from the entire network. We understand that people can be annoying, but it's often better to resolve matters at a channel level before taking too drastic action.

The first step you, as a channel owner or operator, can take, is simply to ban the person:

Unfortunately, many people manage to evade bans. To understand better how to deal with this situation, it is neccessary to look at how bans can be evaded.

A person's identity on IRC is made up of three main parts: the nickname, the ID, and the host. This is given in the following format:

For example, someone whose nickname was LaMeR, whose ID was ~bob and whose host was l4-m3.bitenternet.com would have the following nick "mask":

To evade a ban put on the above mask, the user could change any part of their mask. For example, if a ban was set on the above mask, the user could easily come back into the channel by changing their nickname:

Or by changing their ID:

Or simply by reconnecting, and giving themselves a different hostname:

Fortunately, there is something channel ops can do about this problem. You can use your friend ChanServ to apply an AKICK, which will always kick and ban the person every time they enter, until it is deleted by you or another channel op. But how is an akick set up? Read on...

The basic akick format is as follows:

So let's say that our old friend LaMeR was annoying the channel, evading bans and generally being a nuisance. Your first step would be to find out his ID and hostmask. To do this, simply do a

This would give as part of the WHOIS result something along the lines of:

You can ignore the bit from the * onwards - it's just the user's description (quite apt in this case.) The bit we need is the ID and hostmask, right there in the middle of the first line. Now we know the three parts of the user's identity that they can change, we can set up an akick.

This first akick will only akick the user as they stand, and isn't any more effective than a ban:

We can, however, use * to represent "anything"; for example, the next akick would always ban and kick LaMeR if he came back using the nickname LaMeR, ANY id and any connection on the ISP bitenternet.com:

If things were still not right, you could go further and akick his entire ISP from your channel (although you must be careful here - you could be banning legitimate users from the same ISP!):

If you have any more queries about akick, please FIRST try using our online documentation by typing in IRC:

If you're still unsure, ask in #help on the network.

To turn colours back on, type:

You probably haven't identified to NickServ:

(This answer is dedicated to Ravey)

You can use Blitzed's CLEARBANS tool to clear your channel's bans after a set amount of time. This will not affect akicks (see question 1).

For example, to clear all bans in your channel 24 hours (1440 minutes) after they were first applied, you would do:

Remember, by having a huge and out-of-date bans list, you could be denying legitimate users entry to your channel.