What To Do If You Find Yourself Banned From An IRC Channel
The most likely explanation for the trouble you are experiencing in joining one or more of the CentOS IRC channels is due to the client or gateway that you are using. The freenode web-based IRC gateway is banned from some of our channels due to rampant abuse issues; we wish we didn't have to do this but everytime we try to remove the ban we end up putting it back in place within a day. We strongly recommend the use of a dedicated IRC client such as the text-based irssi client which is provided in our base software repository or another dedicated client such as the graphical hexchat client which can be installed from the EPEL third-party repository. Many other dedicated clients are available as well. If you are unable or unwilling to use a dedicated client you can use an alternate web-based gateway such as irccloud or kiwiirc. Please note that no matter what client / gateway you choose you must have a registered account with freenode to join the #centos and #centos-social channels. Please see the freenode registration instructions for more information on account/nick registration.
Additionally we have a guard bot sitting in some of our channels that may temporarily quiet people for various behaviors such as flooding, abusive nick spam and similar. One of the things the bot watches out for are repeated quit/join sequences; if someone is repeatedly bouncing in and out of our channels they are subject to a temporary re-direct ban to ##fix_your_connection for an hour in the hopes that their connection will stabilize. These quiets and bans will expire automatically but you may inquire about them in our #centos-ops channel if you'd like.
If you find yourself banned for abuse, spamming or similar unwelcome behaviors you will need to speak with one of our IRC channel operators to discuss the matter. This can be accomplished by joining the #centos-ops channel and raising the issue there for discussion. If no one is present at the time we ask that you /part the channel and try again later; we maintain a no-idle policy in the #centos-ops channel.
Please do note that ban evasion is not conducive to the remediation process and we ask that you not do so.