For what it's worth, that's not the intention on freenode's side - we want to sand off some of the rough edges. As an example, it would be nice to have a common

For what it's worth, that's not the intention on freenode's side - we want to sand off some of the rough edges. As an example, it would be nice to have a common flow for speaking to services. Once we have some sensible way, then clients can sensibly opt to pop a dialog for new users allowing them to register an account with nickserv without having to fiddle away in a query.