Why the plus sign matters in +5000

The port for connecting your IRC client to Eggy BNC is normally written as:

+5000

The plus sign is not decoration. It tells many IRC clients and ZNC-style connection fields to use SSL/TLS.

If you use:

5000

without SSL/TLS, your client may try to speak plain IRC to a secure listener. That can produce errors such as connection aborts, handshake failures, immediate disconnects, or confusing TLS messages.

When to use +5000

Use +5000 when connecting your IRC client to Eggy BNC:

/server -m bnc.eggy.net +5000 username/Network:password

If your client has a separate SSL checkbox, enable it and use port 5000.

Do not confuse it with IRC network ports

The Eggy BNC listener port is different from the remote IRC network port. Your BNC may connect onward to a remote network using 6667, +6697, or another port depending on that network.

So this is your client connection:

bnc.eggy.net +5000

and this might be a remote network connection:

irc.example.net +6697

They are not interchangeable.

If your client does not accept +5000

Some clients do not use plus-sign notation. In that case, use port 5000 and enable SSL/TLS in the server settings. The requirement is secure TLS, not the literal plus sign in every interface.

Symptoms of getting it wrong

Wrong SSL/TLS settings can look like a server outage even when Eggy BNC is online. Before opening a ticket, verify that the client is using SSL/TLS for the Eggy BNC connection.