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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 16 2021, @05:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the deleting-your-most-valuable-asset dept.

Yesterday I got this global notice on Freenode IRC network:

We are moving past legacy freenode to a new fork. The new freenode is launched. You will slowly be disconnected and when you reconnect, you will be on the new freenode. We patiently await to welcome you in freedom's holdout - the freenode.

If you're looking to connect now, you can already /server chat.freenode.net 6697 (ssl) or 6667 (plaintext). It's a new genesis for a new era. Thank you for using freenode, and Hello World, from the future. freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom.

When you connect, register your nickname and your channel and get started. It's a new world. We're so happy to welcome you and the millions of others. We will be posting more information in the coming days on our website and twitter. Otherwise, see you on the other side!

I didn't notice it until I was disconnected and reconnected today and found myself cancelled on the network. Since there is no blog post mentioned in the system notice, I went looking and I found a summary of this week's drama from Hugo Landau.

Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC network

The old services database (registered nicknames, channels, etc.) is apparently gone. All of your registered nicknames and channels are gone. Anyone who wishes to continue to use Freenode (though at this point I honestly can't imagine why anyone would want to) must re-register their nickname.

In short, it seems there was no effort whatsoever to migrate the services database when migrating from Atheme to Anope. Not only that, this transition happened suddenly with, as far as I am aware, zero warning. Freenode has simply dropped all nickname and channel registrations without warning.

Even my channel ##hntop which was previously seized personally by Andrew Lee is no longer registered. It's literally open season for anyone who wants to impersonate someone else, steal their nickname, or take over someone else's channel.

What a strange move, to delete all users and channels and make no effort to move them to a new system, and not explain themselves publicly in a blog post!

Earlier Soylent coverage: Freenode Hijacked (Part 2)


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by higuita on Wednesday June 16 2021, @06:30PM

    by higuita (2465) on Wednesday June 16 2021, @06:30PM (#1146052)

    this weekend i entered it to check if any of my commonly used channels where all migrated to libera... all of then already had migrated!
    then i request the channel list and while there was still many channels there, 90% of then had only 1 guy and the biggest one was #linux (or something like) with 12 people there. Some of those one use in channels where simply a forgotten bot. This was huge change from 3 month ago!

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