As many of you will have noticed from the broadcasts and attending the event last Sunday, our popular tutorials are back after an extended sabatical.

If any of you remember the previous tutorials then these will be no surprise. They are scheduled to run every Sunday evening (or Sunday afternoon for our stateside users) and cover a different topic each week. They are designed to help you use QuakeNet and our services more efficiently or ease you into IRC if you are a new user.

The tutorials start with a prepared text to cover the subject of the tutorial; followed by an extensive Q and A session where our eager tutorial team will answer any relevant questions you may have about the tutorial topic.

The tutorials will alternate languages chosen from the most popular languages spoken by the users on QuakeNet, currently these are English, German and French.

Please do attend the tutorials next time you see a broadcast should you wish to learn more about how to use QuakeNet or IRC in general. Once the tutorial is over you can find a log of the tutorial as well as all past tutorials on our forum if you want to recap anything.

Don't be afraid if you can't talk or see other users in the #tutorial channel, this is purely because they are hidden to prevent spam, it's perfectly normal.

We look forward to seeing you there.

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It is with much sadness that we must announce the imminent departure of one of our sponsors, demon.uk, hosted by Demon Internet.

Demon have provided servers for QuakeNet for many years and they will be missed, along with their current admin, Pixie. Demon Internet were recently acquired by Cable&Wireless, and we wish them all the best for the future and thank them for their support over the past several years.

The delink is expected within the next week and several broadcasts will be made to users utilising demon.uk currently before it is powered off. demon.uk.quakenet.org will be redirected to the main UK server pool once the delink is complete.

Update: demon.uk will be delinking at approximately 12pm BST (noon) on Monday the 17th of August. Please switch to another UK server or reconnect to uk.quakenet.org before then.

[ 7 comments ]

Hello QuakeNet!

We're pleased to announce the successful link of a new US based server hosted by Id Software in California. This raises our US capacity even further, and adds a new sponsor. Id Software's server will be maintained by SyncError and TTimo, so please make them feel welcome.

You can try out the new server by /connect'ing to idsoftware.ca.us.quakenet.org on the usual ports, and the server will be appearing in the main US server pool shortly.

[ 15 comments ]

Over at Quakenet we thought we should remind you, our users, of a few important things that affect your security when using our network. We take security very seriously, and although we work very hard to ensure our users are as safe as possible, you yourselves can take measures against auth phishers and generally nasty people.

• Hide your IP Address
  

  This is an often overlooked feature - but if you hide your IP address, people will not be able to do anything nasty to you (such as denial of service attacks) unless they get your IP address from somewhere else. Simply use /mode yournickname +x when authed to Q to hide your IP.

• Phishing attacks
  

  Unfortunately there are nasty people out there who would love to steal the password to your Q account and probably any channels you own. Of course, Q reminds you every time that you should not give your Q account password to ANYONE, not even Quakenet Staff. Please ignore any messages you get asking you to change your password. Report these to #help immediately and we can deal with them for you. Also, please do not type any strange looking commands, if you do not understand what a command does - do not type it! Ask #help if in doubt.

• Keep your details up to date with Q.
  

  If you were to lose or forget your Q password, you can request it to be sent to your registered E-mail address. But, if you have changed this or can no longer get to that email address, we will not be able to recover your Q account for you. So, please keep your email address current on Q - see /msg Q help email on IRC.

• Do not forget about our FAQs!
  

  We have spent a lot of time writing our Frequently Asked Questions section to help with the common problems and questions about Quakenet and IRC. Before asking #help, take a look at the FAQs first. This goes double for the Security FAQ which contains further details and useful hints and tips to keep yourselves safe and secure on our network.

Of course if there are any questions which are not covered by the FAQs, feel free to ask in #help at any time. We would prefer seeing you asking a silly question that keeps you safe, rather than having to retrieve stolen accounts and channels! :)

[ 7 comments ]

We're please to announce that our brand new webchat client is now out of testing and live for public use. The webchat client is the best way to connect to QuakeNet from a web browser, and offers many many excellent features such as full integration with QuakeNet and our "Q" channel service bot.

The new web client is entirely the work of our dedicated development team and you can expect more features soon. The client can also be embedded in your own sites, at no hassle or cost to you, and you can customise its appearance and default settings.

Please give it a play at http://webchat.quakenet.org/! You are welcome to comment on the web client in #dev on QuakeNet to provide feedback.

[ 20 comments ]