Best practice to stop being bullied on IRC

If you are being bullied right now follow this steps:

1. Tell the person bullying you to stop it in a friendly way (eg. “Bully: please stop with this, I don’t want this”) – Also see Anti-Bully-Alias for half-automating this
2. If the bully is not respecting this and continues, ask a channel operator (the people with the !, ~, &, @, % signs infront of their nicknames) to kick the offending bully
3. If the bully re-joins the channel then again politely ask a channel operator to ban the offending bully
4. If the bully continues to harass you via private messaging (also called query) then use /ignore bully (where “bully” stands for the bullies nickname)
5. As a last measure, if none of the previous steps have helped, eg. the bully is harassing you with multiple clients (clones) or similar (often /motd shows you what is illegal to do on a IRC-server),  join the networks help channel (mostly this is #help) and ask for the bully being removed from the network (technical terms for this are: akill, gline, kline) — Really only do this if the previous steps have failed multiple times!

It is important to try steps 1, 2 and 3 first before using /ignore! If you just /ignore the bully he will most likely continue to bully other users. Think about the other users too!

Remember that /quit is not an option to stop bullying!