OUCHnet

OUCHnet is built on a foundation of absolute free speech, with two rules:

1. No child pornography distribution or discussion
2. No network attacks or spamming

Everything else is left up to the channel owners, OUCHnet as a network does not censor free speech.

Channel owners may censor or add additional rules as they see fit.

Connecting

Try our webchat or connect to our round robin domain below. Alternatively, you may select a specific server directly from the list below.

Server List

Channels

Official OUCHnet channels

• #ouch - general chat
• #help - OUCHnet help

Misc

netsplit.de stats

Uptime Monitor

Opers

OUCHnet is owned and operated by LexFerenda

Current Staff

Former Staff

Services

OUCHnet runs Atheme IRC Services

• NickServ Nickname registration service
• ChanServ Channel registration and management Service

Non-Atheme 'Services' provided by ouch

• UrlBot Public simple url title bot

NickServ

NickServ handles operations involving nicknames

• Registration
• Login
• VHosts

Generally nick registration is recommended as it enables you to register channels, get/set flags, etc.. via ChanServ and keeps your nick safe. A valid email is not required. To reset or change your nickserv password without a valid email please ask in #help for assistance

Registration

Registering your nickname on ouch is simple and does not require a valid email address.

/msg NickServ REGISTER bar foo@bar.com

Will register nick bar with email foo@bar.com

Login

The two most common ways to login to nickserv upon connection on OUCH are password forwarding and SASL

Password Forwarding

To use password forwarding ensure you are using TLS and set the server password to your nickserv password. OUCH servers will forward the password to NickServ

SASL

To use SASL ensure you are using TLS and set your client to use SASL with your nickname and nickserv password

Manual

To manually identify once connected with your nickname use:

/msg NickServ identify <nick> {password}

nick is optional as long as your current nick matches your nickserv account

Enforce

To Enable nick enforcement (not allowing someone to use your nick if you are not online) enable the ENFORCE flag.

/msg NickServ set enforce on

Once enabled if someone connects and uses your nick, they have 30 seconds to login or their nick will be force changed

VHosts

OUCHnet by default masks your IP from all of the users. You may set a custom vhost if desired, however to set one you currently need to request it from one of the opers in #help.

Be patient as certain opers may not be online when you are. Request one in #help and a staff member will assist when available

ChanServ

ChanServ handles all channel related services

Channel Registration

To register a new channel make sure you are registered and signed in with nickserv

/msg ChanServ register #channel

ChanServ commands

By default (unless you turn FANTASY flag off in chanserv for your channel) any line prefixed with ! is forwarded to chanserv as a commnd. For example typing !kickban RandomNickname {reason} will kick and set a ban on RandomNickname's hostmask with reason being optional. Without the FANTASY flag you would instead message ChanServ directly like so /msg ChanServ kickban #channel RandomNickname {reason}

Kick/Banning users from your channel

kick

kick simply kicks the user from your channel via chanserv. Not very different from using a direct /kick as a channel op. Takes an optional reason

/msg ChanServ kick #channel RandomNickname spamming

kickban

kickban sets a ban on the specified users hostmask and then kicks them.

/msg ChanServ kickban #channel RandomNickname spamming

ban

ban similar to kickban but does not remove the user after setting the ban

/msg ChanServ ban #channel RandomNickname spamming

unban

unban removes a ban

/msg ChanServ unban #chat *!*@*.host.mask

UrlBot

A simple bot for url titles is available for any channel. To use in your channel simply /invite noturl

Once noturl is in your channel, it will respond to any link with the <title> if available

Incident Reports

2025-04-23

Ouch website and webchat were down briefly. This was caused by a swarm scan exhausting resources. Measures were put in place to prevent this from occuring again.

2023-07-04

irc.supernets.org spam wave hit our network and many others. Many opers were offline at the time leaving a large spam hit. Once opers were back filters were in place and auto nickserv registration was disabled briefly. Some channels set the +R flag to prevent unregistered users from joining. After a few days passed and the gline list built up the spam wave stopped. We have since enabled an improved regex filter module to allow us to catch more spam on demand. Also as a reminder their are chanserv flood protections you can enable for your channel which will kickban flooders. During a spamwave the best practice would be to set channel mode +s (which hides your channel from /list and /who). Now for the future we are far more protected from this sort of attack as we have the proper modules in place ready to go. We did not origianlly have filter modules because we want complete free speech but have found it useful in network wide spam attacks.

2023-03-22

Early in the moring forest.ouch.chat had lost linkage with the network. This was resolved around 08:00 EST. Atheme Services were also updated this morning as well causing a 5 minute outage of nickserv, chanserv, etc... forest.ouch.chat and pegasus.ouch.chat were officially removed from the network due to lack of traffic and low user counts for now.

2022-12-21

Around 19:00 UTC the server hosting services (nickserv/chanserv/etc..) was migrated. During this migration a disk failure occured. This failure uncovered an issue in our fallback linkage for the server nodes. I attempted to restore operations quickly when i was made aware by correcting linkage issues. Due to personal work conflicts i was unable to restore services fully until 01:00 UTC. This issue should not happen again and uncovered a weakness in our redundant linkages that is now fixed. Thank you for your patience.

• blackbeard420

Connecting Via Tor

Prior to using the onion you must connect clearnet to irc.ouch.chat to register your nickserv account.

TOR use is enabled via an onion link:

cvhhtp6fyf55faza7pbmy7vp2rdqnf6s5kcxbo5d2uahsmmen5eslqyd.onion

TLS Fingerprint: A4BC80696DAC936677DE0DCEA429D3B985C8A67449C5E54EB773BE5F5FBE9ECD

Keep in mind:

• All tor connections require SASL + TLS (either use TLS Fingerprint OR no-verify)
• All tor connections MUST use the .onion url. Direct connections to the clearnet urls are not supported
• Spamming via TOR will result in a deletion of NickServ account

When connected via tor properly you will get an ouchnet/tor/user cloak

Policy subject to change and will be updated here.