[alekratz]

some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server password is another option, but we run into the same problems.

my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.

I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.