IRC is old and creaky and it needs to be improved. The point was that an IP address is not a person or entity or identity. In most cases it’s easy to change your IP address. So the admins end up playing whack a mole. If the IRC server switched to requiring SASL then you couldn’t connect without asserting an identity, and then you wouldn’t be permitted to do damaging things without an identity. And then you could ban problematic identities. You’ll still play whack a mole, but it will have a different flavour, but most importantly it won’t affect innocents.
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