Comment 1 for bug 318646

InspIRCd (with the services_account module) adds an accountname field to a user, which is independent of the nick. The most obvious win here is that changing nick doesn't log the user out.

My plan with NickServ was to only allow registering and identifying using a nick that matched an accountname, but there's no reason we have to do that. On the other hand, some kind of linking might be a good idea in that secondary nicks can still get NickServ protection.