Greetings, Quakenet uses a ping message to authenticate you. The pong reply that cl-irc sends is wrong: You get PING :anumber and the reply that gets send is PONG anumber : Reason for this is an error in the pong-function: (defmethod pong ((connection connection) (server string) &optional (server2 "")) (send-irc-message connection :pong server server2)) The last argument of send-irc-message is placed behind a : As the last argument is the empty string the ping reply is incorrect Fix: (defmethod pong ((connection connection) (server string) &optional server2) (if server2 (send-irc-message connection :pong server) (send-irc-message connection :pong server server2))) Reinout