April 18, 2004

How do I ban someone from my channel?

You must be a channel op or half op to set bans.

In most IRC clients you can simply type, /ban nick or /ban user@host.

Set a Ban with ChanServ:
You may wish to set a ban using ChanServ. Depending on the SIGNKICK settings of your channel this might mask which op set the ban (explained further below.)
To set the ban type: /cs ban #channel nick reason
If nick is not given, it will ban you. If channel and nick are not given, it will ban you on all channels you're on, provided you have the rights to. By default, limited to AOPs or those with level 5 access and above on the channel.

SIGNKICK Enables or disables signed kicks for a channel. When SIGNKICK is set, kicks issued with the ChanServ KICK or BAN commands will have the nick that used the command in their reason. If you use LEVEL, those who have a level that is superior or equal to the SIGNKICK level on the channel won't have their kicks signed. The command to set SIGNKICK is: /msg chanserv set #channel signkick {ON | LEVEL | OFF}

Additional mIRC Ban options:
In mIRC the syntax for the ban command is: /ban [-ru#] [#channel] [type]

If you use the -u# option, then mIRC will pause # seconds before removing the ban.
For example, if we want to ban the user JOE for 3 seconds, we would type: /ban -u3 #channel joe 1

If you specify the -r switch then /ban removes the ban of the specified type for that nickname, for example: /ban -r joe 1 would remove the ban on joe that we just set for joe.

You can put a user@host in for the nickname instead if you like. For example, if we wanted to ban everyone from AOL, we would use the following: /ban #channel *!*@*aol.com and to remove that ban, we would use: /ban -r #channel *!*@*aol.com

When banning a nickname, it is useful to know that there are different types of user@host masks you can use. The table below shows what each result of using the command: /ban NICK #

# represents the numbers in the chart below. There are 9 different types of bans - they are as follows:

0: *!user@host.domain
1: *!*user@host.domain
2: *!*@host.domain
3: *!*user@*.domain
4: *!*@*.domain
5: nick!user@host.domain
6: nick!*user@host.domain
7: nick!*@host.domain
8: nick!*user@*.domain
9: nick!*@*.domain

If you don't specify a type (number at the end of the ban), and you were to just type /ban #channel NICK then mIRC will ban the user's exact user@host.

#channel isn't totally necessary either. If you are on typing in a channel window, for example, #channel, you could use: /ban NICK 3

The above command would result in NICK being banned from #channel with the hostmask: *!*user@*.domain