Suggestion for moderating nick changes.

[wnelson <wnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know this has probably been discussed before, but I'm convinced that
not allowing nick changes when a user does not have the power of speech
on one or more channels would be a good thing for IRCnet.

Why?

Well, flooding a channel with nickchanges and lagging their bots (so 
the bots end up opping the wrong person) is still a much used method of
channel takeovers. The code for each nickchange seems to me to be pretty
CPU intensive (from looking at the ircd source), so no doubt all these
nick changes mean everyone on the server suffers during a flood.

Right now people on a channel being flooded can prevent CTCPs to the
channel by setting +m - but this does not affect nickchange floods. To
change this would only take a tiny bit of code, and I've made and
tested such a modification myself and found no problems.

Anyway.. Just an idea...

Wull@IRCnet.