Consider the following connection attempt...

[15:34] * Connecting to graz.at.eu.undernet.org (6667)
[15:34] ERROR: Your host is trying to (re)connect too fast -- throttled
[15:34] * Disconnected

You may ask yourself why.

An IRC server can only accept so many connections at a time from one host, or IP address. This is a security measure against the various forms of clone bots and flood bot abuse of IRC, and is known as "throttling".

A network will want to minimize the number of ways people can harass others on it. A common loophole were to take advantage of net-splits to gain ops in channels and cause nick-collisions has been largely elimated with the use of services and ircD security improvements.

Server throttling is a security measure to control flooding, the most common way to cause a DOS (Denial Of Service) or just causing annoyance. Flooding is to send a lot of unwanted data to something, so that their connection is lost, their channel window is filled with garbage or they are otherwise harassed.

Connections from clone botters that use several different servers are also spotted by modern IRC servers.

Problems with getting throttled accidentally may be caused by the fact that your client retries to connect too fast, Set up your irc client to wait a period of 20 seconds before reconnecting.

If you're using mIRC 5.91+, you're in luck. As of version 5.91, mIRC now waits 30 seconds before a re-connect attempt if the server says that you were throttled for connecting too fast.

mIRC now looks for the word "throttled" in the ERROR Closing Link server message.

* Specific to Undernet:

Connecting 3 times in a row to the undernet within 20 seconds will get your IP throttled for 20 seconds.

** For all networks

You should configure your IRC client to try connecting to the next server in the group (ie Dalnet, Undermet, Efnet) to make sure that eventually your client will reconnect and walk away. mIRC supports server grouping.

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by Joydrop edited by removed
last modified: 2002-07-27 01:40:09