BNC4FREE is closing – Migration Information

We are about to start migrating accounts from two of our servers very shortly, this is anticipated to take place between Sunday 7th June 2026 and Sunday 14th June 2026 with the aim of all accounts being migrated by the end date.

What do I need to know?

Your account will be migrated onto another server over the coming days. There is nothing that you will need to do at the moment. Once migrated you will be able to login to the other server using the same username and password as you currently use. Please note if you currently use NickServ Access on some networks you will need to update this. Those that use CertFP or SASL to identify to some networks, there may be some steps you need to take. We are currently looking at moving this data across to make the move as seamless as possible and will update you on this.

How will I know I have been migrated?

Each user that has been migrated will be sent an email confirming that the migration has been successful with details on how to login to the new server.

What if I cannot login to the new server or something is not working?

Please email our support email, this will be closely monitored throughout the migration process.

I haven’t logged in for a while, what will happen?

If you have not logged into your account via IRC since the 1st February 2026, this will be deemed as inactive and be removed. This applies to all suspended accounts that have been suspended over 3 months. This will enable to us to gain accurate numbers of sessions and users that need migrating. If you feel your account has been removed in error, please email our support team.

Will the founder/owners of BNC4FREE still be running these servers and hold our data?

Yes, the server that you will be migrated to is still owned by us and its current founder, there is no intention to sell the server or any data held to a third-party, other organisation or any individual at this time. All users of the service would be notified prior to any change.

Further updates on our progress with this will be provided throughout the week

BNC4FREE is closing

Hello all and welcome to 2026, it has been a while since we last posted so we wanted to give you an update on the future of BNC4FREE.

In January 2026, early decisions were made that BNC4FREE is a large expense to those that pay for the servers and that this needed to change, we have looked at various solutions to reduce costs and potential options of re-branding to be able to offer a premium service however unfortunately all of the options that we have explored would incur further cost.

BNC4FREE has always been a free service since 2007-2008 when it was launched under the name of TechVision when we were one of the first providers to offer free IRC bouncers as a service, today there are many alternative bouncer providers and better software that can be used which makes this easier to run a provider with many alternative providers being available. With this in mind, we have taken the difficult decision to close BNC4FREE and there are no more new requests being taken.

There will be many asking what will happen to my account, we are currently looking at migrating these onto one of our servers that we have planned to keep for existing accounts. You will receive a migration email before we migrate your account so we can let you know when this will happen. Migrations are planned to be completed before the end of the financial year, 5th April 2026.

We understand this will be disappointing news to some, We will post further updates very soon.

Welcome to 2025

Hello BNC4FREE users and readers, welcome to 2025 and a happy new year. It has been a while since we last posted and we wanted to give you a few updates. There are planned changes for this year which include involving new staff and finally rolling out a new version of our bouncer software, including a customised web-panel that utilises our API. We are also looking at improving our response times to emails and requests in addition to the above.

We will in due course be rolling out a recruitment exercise to take on more staff to be able to achieve the above goal, there will be a series of questions involved in this that will enable us to establish your knowledge of the role that you are going for. Please do note that at this stage, all roles with BNC4FREE are voluntary however this may change in future. The date for the recruitment exercise is not yet set in stone but we will ensure this is announced on available channels as soon as it becomes live.

At the present moment we are currently dealing with a backlog of support emails and requests, please continue to send the emails and request as normal, these will be picked up as soon as possible. We are also tackling abuse of the service that appears to have gone on for some time, this may mean some popular networks are suspended temporarily, this link will provide more information on networks that can and can’t be requested.

As a reminder, multiple accounts are not allowed as per our Terms of Service, we are seeing frequent violation of the terms and in coming weeks and months will be addressing these accordingly going forward.

Urgent Server Updates (15th July 2021)

Update 15th July 2021 at 05:04 UTC: All servers have now been updated as per the message below. If you are having any issues after the update please let us know by contacting us.

Dear All,

During some recent testing of our existing bouncer software, we have located a number of issues and bugs that need to be rectified with our software, one or more of these bug’s unfortunately have the potential to cause a denial of service and therefore it is our priority to rectify the issue as soon as possible to prevent this from being exploited.

With this in mind, all of our servers will be updated with fixes and restarted within the next 24 hours. This will mean a brief downtime on each of the servers for an estimated 15 minutes while the fixes are applied and the servers rebuilt.

To avoid disruption to the majority of our users from Europe, United States, Canada and a few other countries outside of these zones, the servers will be updated in alphabetical order on Thursday 15th July 2021 between the hours of 04:00 UTC and 05:00 UTC.

Prior to the server upgrade, we recommend you do the following for minimal disruption to you when the server returns:

• Ensure you have the chansaver module loaded. This will ensure all your channels are saved to the configuration and re-joined after the server is restarted.
• Ensure you have the nickserv or sasl module loaded and configured. This will ensure that when the bouncer reconnects to your designated IRC network, you will be identified to services.
• Ensure you have the perform module loaded and configured. This can be used as an alternative to the nickserv module, used to set user modes when the bouncer reconnects to your designated IRC network and used to login to other bots such as IdleRPG.

To load any of the modules mentioned above, use

You can then use the following, replacing ‘module’ with the loaded module name for a list of the modules commands:

We apologise for any inconvenience this minor downtime will cause.

Yours Sincerly,
BNC4FREE Staff Team

A Quick Update

Hello, Hi and Welcome, It’s been a while since we’ve posted an update so here’s an update of where we’re at.

As many of you will be aware, Freenode as it was has changed and many of its staff and users have migrated to Libera.Chat. We do still operate a channel on Freenode but also have one on Libera.Chat for your convenience. We also have channels you can request in on networks listed here. Due to the drama that I’m sure many of you are aware of, Libera.Chat is considered our main network at present and this is based on all of our staff voluntarily moving to this network.

Please be aware, if you have quite possibly by accident signed up with us for new accounts when you wanted to obtain 3 networks as per our terms of service, we are now actively suspending multiple accounts. If somehow you have requested more than one account when it should have been a network request, let us know by emailing support@bnc4free.com. We will be able to merge the networks from your other accounts into one of the accounts you have and no other action will be taken in terms of violating the Terms of Service for multiple accounts. Any accounts detected before your email may be suspended by our services bot but we will rectify this upon receipt of your email. For Further clarification, this does not apply to users that have more than 1 network on their account and only applies to users that have more than 1 account with a different network on each account.

Many thanks again for the continued use and support of bnc4free, we’re constantly working away in the background to improve and continue our service and are fully aware that without you it wouldn’t be possible.

Thanks for keeping with us

Freenode Changes

Dear those that use Freenode on our service,

From today your host will change when you reconnect. Instead of the normal vhost we have assigned you will have “gateway/shell/bnc4free/x-sznknfelebihegpe” or something similar.

Please note that any unaffiliated cloaks you have on Freenode or group cloaks are unaffected by this change. You most likely will receive a bnc4free cloak initially on connect unless you use SASL but once you identify to your nickname, the usual unaffiliated or group cloak will apply.

We appreciate this is annoying for anyone that runs bots or services that rely on hostnames. We have taken these steps to mitigate ddos that may originate from users of freenode.

Many thanks again for the continued use of bnc4free and we will continue to do what we can for you.

Server Updates

Hello! We have some exciting news that there will a new bouncer update rolled out within the next few days. This update fixes a couple of critical bugs, adds a few new features/modules and adds translations for modules and messages that were lacking translation before. The fixes and updates in this upgrade are as follows:

• New Authentication Module (SASL/CertFP/NickServ and server passwords). This will enable fallback options, for example is SASL fails, it will try CertFP and if CertFP fails it will try NickServ as a last resort. This also allows for those who need a bouncer to a network that requires a password to set a password for connecting.
• New Web Interface for the Log Module. This will allow you view logs (up to 100MB in size) from within the web admin and download log files that are stored by the log module.
• Update & Fix Translations for Away Module
• Add Translations for the main page (displayed after login) and translate error messages on other pages
• API: Numerous fixes to JSON formatting and structure
• Improvements to abuse prevention measures
• Improvements to staff/audit logging
• Fix for DenyModNetwork feature
• Fix for DenySetIdent feature added in previous update

Unfortunately this will mean a brief downtime of each of our bouncer servers for around 5-20 minutes while the server is reconfigured and upgraded. Final fixes and testing of the new upgrade will be carried out tomorrow (10th January 2021) with the intention to upgrade Pear server almost immediately once the upgrade is ready to be rolled out. Apple server will be upgraded a short while after Pear’s upgrade. More specific information on the estimated time/date of both upgrades will be posted on Facebook, Twitter and in a Reddit Post.

In the last week we have been working on updating/upgrading our services bot on IRC and parts of the website. This work will continue into next week to provide more features such as ability to reset passwords, delete your own networks and add other IRC servers from the same network into your server list (useful for networks like EFnet that have regular splits/downtime).

That’s all for now but we’ll provide you with more updates in the near future!

Network Issues affecting various services

At around 10:03 UTC on Tuesday 5th of January, we discovered that a number of our services had gone offline. These services were affected:

• Apple Bouncer (Both IRC & Webpanel)
• Main Website (https://bnc4free.com/)
• Wiki (https://wiki.bnc4free.com/)
• Status Information (https://status.bnc4free.com/)
• Bouncer API (https://api.bnc4free.com)
• IRC Services Bot

This outage was caused by a network fault at our provider which they are in the process of rectifying. Since the initial downtime there has also been a very brief period of downtime at around 12:47 UTC. Our provider are still working to resolve the issue and its anticipated the latency on all the above affected services and possibly brief periods of downtime may continue during today.

Update (18:55 UTC): All earlier network issues appear to now be resolved.

Apologies for the inconvenience that the downtime of all the affected services today has caused

Recent Downtime

At around 10:27 UTC on Monday the 14th of December, we discovered that a number of our services had gone offline. These services were affected:

• Apple Bouncer (Both IRC & Webpanel)
• Main Website (https://bnc4free.com/)
• Wiki (https://wiki.bnc4free.com/)
• Status Information (https://status.bnc4free.com/)
• Bouncer API (https://api.bnc4free.com)
• IRC Services Bot

This outage was caused by a fault with our service providers router of which they managed to resolve at around 13:30 UTC on Monday the 14th of December

In addition to these services issues, Google Suite also had issues that started around 11:30 UTC on Monday the 14th of December. This meant that for a majority of our service downtime, we were also unable to access emails. This issue has now been resolved and we can receive and send emails again.

Apologies for the inconvenience that the downtime of all the affected services today has caused

December Update

Hello! It’s been a while, I know it isn’t yet December but it is a month tomorrow since we last posted. To keep everyone in the loop and be frankly honest, (I’m gonna say the word we all hate) Covid-19. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to yet upgrade the servers and our services bot (i really want to) due to personal circumstances. I’m probably more annoyed about it than some of those expecting it. The aim was and still is to roll out an update at Christmas which i used to do annually on Christmas day which I did almost regularly when this service first started. I intend to do that this year but i cannot offer a guarantee, for reasons including internet speed where i will be staying this Christmas to a whole range of other personal circumstances right now that require more attention than me programming.

I hope (and i really do) that we can update the servers over Christmas with the newer version and our services. It will be a shame to lose the 148 days uptime we have on our Apple server and 80 days our Pear server currently has (both will be more by Christmas) but we will continue to be the stable provider and people we’ve always been even after the upgrade.

Once again, I’d like to thank those that use our services, no matter how small or large we really do thank you for choosing us and hopefully we don’t disappoint! If for any reason you need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us using our contact page (email is preferred at the moment)

More updates will be provided in the next week or so.