ChanServ, as its name suggests, manages channels. Its primary purpose is to manage user access levels, so that people can automatically become voices, ops, or whatever. You must register a channel to use it with ChanServ. ChanServ can do the following things:

• Register (and Drop): Assigns a channel to you. You need the name of the channel, a password, and a description of the channel. The description pretty much only shows up in info requests. Drop unregisters a channel.
• Identify: Identifies you with ChanServ for a channel, which is required for some of the more “secure” commands.
• Info: Displays some basic info about a channel, including the founder, its description, and the last topic.
• VOP, HOP, AOP, SOP: These four assign people to various levels of automatic access. Setting a user’s access to one of these will cause ChanServ to grant them +v, +h, +o, or +a upon entering the channel, assuming they’ve identified. See  So what do all those modes do?
• Status: Tells you what access a given user has on a given channel.
• Access: If, for some reason, the four levels provided aren’t fine-grained enough, this will allow you to place users in-between the ‘main’ access levels. See “levels” below (confused yet?)
• Levels: Controls what level you need to be to execute various commands. For example, by default, you need to be an op (+o) to use the ChanServ invite command, but you need to be protected (+a) to use the clear command.
• AKick: If anyone with a hostmask matching one of the ones entered here enters the channel, they will be kicked and banned. Useful for keeping particularly troublesome people out.
• Voice, Devoice, HalfOp, DeHalfOp, Op, DeOp, Protect, DeProtect: Sets +v, -v, +h, -h, +o, -o, +a, -a respectively on a user. Useful if you have permissions to grant these modes in the channel but due to the current set of modes the IRCd itself won’t let you.
• Invite: Invites yourself into the channel. Primarily used to get around bans, assuming you’re high enough access to use it.
• UnBan: Removes any bans in the channel that affect you.
• Kick: Exactly like the regular kick, only done by ChanServ so it again can work in cases where the IRCd won’t let you.
• Topic: Sets a channel’s topic. Again, same thing about ChanServ having special access.
• Clear: Clears a channel of various things.
  • Bans, Exceptions and Invites remove all active entries of these things.
  • Modes resets the channel to its ‘default’ modes (see Set ModeLock below).
  • Voices, Halfops, and Ops removes +v, +h, and +o, respectively, from all users in the channel.
  • Users kicks everybody out of the channel. Use with care.
• List: Lists all registered channels.
• Set: Manages various ChanServ settings for your channel:
  • Founder: Changes the founder of the channel. Can only be set by the current founder.
  • Password: Changes the founder’s password. Can also only be set by the current founder.
  • Successor: If the founder’s nick expires, is deleted, or otherwise lost, the successor listed here becomes the new founder. Otherwise, the channel also becomes unregistered.
  • Desc: Changes the description entered when the channel was registered for Info requests.
  • URL: Associates a URL with the channel for Info requests.
  • Email: Associates an email… yeah you get the idea.
  • EntryMsg: Displays a message upon entering the channel. It’s sent via notice, not channel message, so the channel is not spammed by these.
  • KeepTopic: If all users leave the channel, when someone re-enters ChanServ resets the topic to the last known one. This is pretty useful.
  • TopicLock: Locks the channel topic so it can only be changed with ChanServ’s Topic command. Any attempt to change it otherwise will lead to it being automatically reverted.
  • MLock: Locks the channel modes to on, off, or neither. You’ll definitely want to look up the syntax on this one. See  So what do all those modes do?
  • Private: Your channel does not appear in a ChanServ List command.
  • Restricted: If enabled, only users on the access list may enter the channel.
  • Secure: Only registered users may have access in the channel.
  • SecureOps: Only registered users may have ops in the channel.
  • LeaveOps: If enabled, if a user enters the channel and it is otherwise empty, they will not have their ops removed (as they would normally gain from the IRCd from entering an empty channel.)
  • OpNotice: When enabled, any time one of the Op, HalfOp, etc, family of commands is used, a notice is sent to the channel.
  • Enforce: If enabled, ChanServ does its best to “keep” users at their access level, automatically restoring lost ops and so on.

That’s all for today! Again, ‘/cs help commands’ for the whole list or ‘/cs help [command]‘ for a specific one, and if your client does not understand server-side aliases (irssi, pidgin) you will need to use the full ‘/msg chanserv’ instead of just ‘/cs’.

Next time, MemoServ!