The new team at the FreeNode IRC Network have expressed their regret over an incident that occurred yesterday, which was seen by some communities as a takeover of their IRC channels. For example, the Ubuntu, Gentoo, HardenedBSD, LibreELEC, FSFE, and Void Linux projects announced they were leaving FreeNode due to the loss of control over their channels.
After the departure of the team of administrators who founded the new Libera.Chat network due to a conflict with the owner of the domains, some open projects moved discussions to the Libera.Chat platform and blocked the ability to communicate in the old channels. The FreeNode administration considered unacceptable the actions taken, preventing users from continuing to communicate on the old channels due to the setting of bots that automatically delete users with the message that the channel has moved to the Libera.Chat network. According to FreeNode, it was enough just to display a message about the move without blocking.
FreeNode representatives considered the blocking as a coercion for users who did not want to leave the old network, and made changes to the rules to prohibit such blocking of channel users. In the event of blocking the possibility of communication, the new rules prescribed closing the channel and redirecting user connections to another thematic channel.
For channel users who blocked communication, a script was written that creates a new channel in a different namespace "##" (for example, ##ubuntu instead of #ubuntu) and automatically redirects users trying to connect to the old channel to this channel. The problem turned out to be that the new FreeNode team did not properly test this script before implementation, did not notify users of the upcoming change in advance (there was a discussion only in the #freenode-policy-feedback niche channel), and did not take into account all the nuances.
The script determined the fact of channel migration by the presence of the string "libera" in the channel header, but it was overlooked that many projects still remaining in FreeNode were only at the stage of discussing migration to a new network and, accordingly, mentioned "libera" in the channel topic. The script created mirrors in the new namespace for these channels as well, and began forwarding users to another channel, which caused a wave of indignation and accusations of channel hijacking.
About 720 IRC channels are believed to have been affected by the script, including channels from the OpenBSD, NetBSD, Gentoo, WikiMedia, Python, Rust, POSIX, OpenZFS, Linux, and FOSDEM projects. Some communities that were still hesitant about migrating were forced to migrate to the new network as they lost control of their channels on the FreeNode network. The FreeNode administration began work on returning the channels after complaints, but it was too late and the network's reputation suffered.
Source: opennet.ru