There is a huge list of suggestions here http://fold.it/portal/node/992961 .

The ultimate cause of her problem was that she had deleted and recreated her account, I think.

Start by asking Nickserv if he has successfully identified (instructions towards the bottom of the page). If his client is not identifying, then nickserv has a different key than his client has. You'll have to work out why that is, or make a permanent ban exception in chanserv.

brow42 and CFC,

A thousand thanks for your help in trying to solve this problem.

***** Problem summary, for future reference: ****

Hans deleted everything from foldit portal and left.

Then he decided to re-join and re-created his same account two weeks later. Hans asked to re-join our group foldeRNA and was accepted. He could play and upload/download solutions to the group.

He could also chat in global but NOT in our group chat.

>>>> The problem is that people's nickserv registrations aren't removed when the player is deleted.

So the NEW IRC key is not recognized by the nickserv and returns "STATUS hansvandenhof 1" to the query "/msg NickServ status hansvandenhof"

The SIMPLE fix was for Hans to create a chat-only account and re-apply to foldRNA group.

and a special thanks to marie for the SIMPLE fix.

This does appear to be an account deletion issue or maybe the recent IRC server reset restoring an old identify key. Deleting the account did not drop the nickname from nickserv. When the account is recreated registering the name will fail. Nickserv will expect the old irc key which no longer matches the one used by the game or on the website. The fix would be to drop and re-register the nickname on nickserv. The problem seems to be that the nickserv drop commands requires the old identify key that is lost when the account is deleted.

Looking at the documentation for the irc services there should be a way to forcefully drop a nickname, but the command is limited to services admins. Once the name is deleted from nickserv the fix irc permissions page *should* register everything again http://fold.it/portal/user/me/edit/IRC

I think this need to be assigned to KXU, I can't think of anyone else who would have or be able to obtain services super-user/services admin permissions on the IRC server

For kxu: see http://achurch.org/services/docs-5.1.24/4.html for the IRC Services Manual. I believe thats the set of services being used on fold.it's server.

The dropnick command should do the job.

DROPNICK
Syntax:
/msg nickserv DROPNICK nickname
Drops the given nickname from the NickServ database, as well as any linked nicknames.
Limited to Services admins.

Kxu, can you look into Judecca's question?

and thanks to Judecca for really explaining it well