> Last I knew, most IRC servers didn't support authentication directly. That's not quite true anymore. While many IRC servers don't directly talk with the user

> Last I knew, most IRC servers didn't support authentication directly. That's not quite true anymore. While many IRC servers don't directly talk with the user database, but indirectly to the services daemon (which provides the mentioned NickServ, etc.), most support SASL authentication these days (one of the more widely adopted IRCv3 extensions on the client and server side). So you can directly authenticate yourself right at the start of the connection without having to talk to any special services.