ramdon nick names?

[r3k2]

Hello is possible to have a server enforce option to give ramdon non-sense nicknames to people when they join the server? and of course dissalow a /nick change. This is for anonymous servers that will want to make sure nobody ever reuses a nick name to be tied for more than one session, cases to be use on i2p/tor and any other similar situation.

thanks

[slingamn]

This is an interesting possibility and I'll consider it.

I'm not sure what the precise objectives of this change are. Is this primarily about:

1. Protecting users from making opsec mistakes? There are still other places where users can intentionally or unintentionally publish human-readable identifiers, in particular the user/ident field and the realname/gecos field. (Major clients like irssi default to taking user/ident from the UNIX username, and realname from the /etc/passwd entry.)
2. Preventing users from being able to claim continuity of identity across sessions? "Traditional" IRC has no protection or reservation of nicknames, but people work around it.

[r3k2]

hello Slingamn, it will be primary with the number 1. intention and yeah the nick name is a start but as much information can be randomize it the better, think tor-browser on IRC-server option :) but since is on server side/option to enable it will work not only on TOR but on i2p, clear-net etc etc.

[slingamn]

Thanks, that's interesting. I was already considering an option to suppress user/ident (#1213). I might also consider unconditionally suppressing it for clients connecting on Tor-designated listeners (these are the clients for which we already suppress non-action CTCP messages).

Typical darknet sites allow users to register accounts and log into them, no? So it's not obvious to me that making nicknames opaque, and forcing users to change them on each reconnection, is actually worth it in terms of the privacy-usability tradeoff.

A point of comparison is with anonymous imageboards, where the user demand for persistent identities is so great that an alternative identification system (tripcodes) evolved to fill the vacuum.

[r3k2]

I like your ideas, but I am 100% that not letting people have an "ego" and repeat their usernames and the fact that is known that nobody could do this since is random will make people joining feel better, so I think it should be also added to the features you are suggesting as a whole package. @slingamn we know this works because some IRC servers people on i2p has wrote third party plugins to do this. I am just looking for a GO server for many reasons like speed and also because I am starting to play with GO now and that way I could help on minor PR's

[slingamn]

Thanks, I'll take that into consideration. Are there precedents I can look at, i.e., are any of the existing plugins open-source?

[slingamn]

Also, to clarify --- if you know someone who's interested in setting up an onion service or the equivalent that works along these lines, I'm definitely interested in implementing this as a branch / patchset (even if I don't end up including it in the master branch).