IRC Spambots and why you must register your nickname

Thank you everyone for contacting the opensim developers and community.

Recently, there have been a few incidents of IRC bot spam.    In each of these instances, we've had to set the channel +R, which means that only users who are registered on freenode can join the channel.   All most all of these bots are not programmed to create a registered freenode account first.   This keeps them off the channel.   If you do find that the channels are set +R, you will get a message when you try to join saying that you must be registered.      Please either register your nickname with freenode or wait a few hours and come back.   Usually the channel will be opened up to everyone again in 10-12 hours.     

One more thing!    If you see a bot spamming the channel, don't click the link!   Even if the spam message seems like it's coming from someone or somewhere official.   It's a social engineering trick to get you to click the link.   The link usually contains a web page with a zero day browser exploit that will take over your computer and turn your computer into an IRC bot that does the same spamming to a different IRC channel.