It has come to my attention that since about one week, several people who used the PJIRC java applet avaliable through the website navigation bar to access our IRC channel got kicked from the EFnet server for changing their nicknames. In fact, as soon as the /nick <nickname> command is used, most of the time, the user is immediately disconnected with a message saying they are banned for 1440 minutes. Since irc.chowned.org was the only EFnet server that seemed to be compatible with the PJIRC applet for auto-connecting, we haven't found a solution to this yet, but until it is fixed, if you get kicked when changing your nickname on the IRC channel, use the "/server" command to switch to another EFnet server. For some reasons, while PJIRC seems to be able to auto-connect to only one EFnet server, afterward you can manually connect to a larger choice. A list of server can be found at http://www.efnet.org . For example, if you use irc.servercentral.net, just type /server irc.servercentral.net.

This is why we only recommend the built-in IRC client of this website as last resort. We recommend installing a client like mIRC or X-Chat or to use www.mibbit.com (which also seems to have trouble connecting to many EFnet servers, though).

Sorry for the inconveniences this might be causing.