NickServ and HydraIRC

I've been hanging out on the #epicode IRC channel for the past few months, and over time I've played with several IRC clients such as XChat, Mibbit (for the Web) and HydraIRC. One of the things that you do most often on IRC is /msg people. The server that I use for #epicode is FreeNode. This server requires you to register you nick before doing a /msg. If you try to /msg without registering, you get an error message back from the server. XChat, annoyingly, didn't show me the IRC error and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what was wrong. Mibbit behaves nicely, but you have to enter your credentials every time which is a pain. (tip: on Mibbit,  click the 'Auth' link next to the server dropdown on the main page and you can enter your NickServ password straight in there!) HydraIRC behaves nicely too, but I've been having problems getting it to store my NickServ password so I don't have to enter it every time.

In theory, the password is saved by HydraIRC when you create a favourite, but it doesn't seem to work for channel favourites, only server favourites. No, I've no idea why. If you look in the XML profile file in the HydraIRC installation directory all the information looks correct. Maybe they work for you but they sure are a pain for me. Thankfully, there is an easy workaround. HydraIRC has a bit of a hack called Command Profiles. I wouldn't describe them as a well-documented feature but they do the trick. Essentially a command profile is just a set of IRC commands that can be run automatically when you connect to a particular IRC server. You can find the command profiles by going Options -> Prefs... -> Command Profiles. In there, you create a profile using a special name so that is picked up on logging in to a server. The name, in my case, is FreeNode_OnLoggedIn. Within that I simply put in my NickServ identification.

When I go to my #epicode channel favourite now, it automatically runs my identification with NickServ so that I can /msg people without the pesky error message and having to register myself manually with NickServ every time!