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Comment by plorntus | Hacker News Reader

Eh I feel as though you relinquished the channel the second you essentially shut it down. Why would freenode or any IRC server want to just keep a channel that is unused except to advertise a different server? I would understand more if it was some sort of specific channel that the name was clearly exclusively yours but its rather generic and a bot that many people here could also maintain.

Strikes me as sort of 'domain squatting'

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Freenode broke their own policies to do this: https://freenode.net/policies

>Primary channels do not expire with inactivity, though they can be claimed at any time by a representative of an on-topic project with the appropriate name. Topical channels expire after 60 days in which no user on the access list for the channel has joined it.

##hntop is a topical channel, since it begins with ##.

The policy page you listed said no spamming. Your blog complaint says you spammed.

"This channel has moved to Liberachat, effective immediately: irc.libera.chat ##hntop"

You and I have very, very different definitions of spam. I see a guidepost giving me direction.

I really don't think that's going to fly.

People are concerned that you don't have the community's best interests at heart. Your actions say you don't have the community's best interests at heart.

All this lawyering corpspeak means nothing when your actions don't back it up.

If you want to prove us wrong, walk the walk.

edit:

Looking at the list of top10 channels[0], several of them have such notices in their topics. If this takeover was policy, can we assume you'll do the same to ##linux? Or is it a very selective policy only to be enforced when you have a personal interest or believe you can get away with it?

[0] https://netsplit.de/channels/?net=Freenode

If ##hntop was truly involved in spam, you would shut it down, not take it over.

Are you implying that you are going to deny every community that envisages to leave your network to advertise to their users that they moved ?

Where does it say that?

You are losing trust with every word.

You have a valid point but in the IRC netiquette there's a strong (very strong) taboo against server/network operators abusing their permissions to interfere with channels, particuarly taking over a channel that is registered.

This is indicative of the broader problem: whereas the former staff treated Freenode as a community resource of which they were stewards (hence also the policy around abandoned channels), the new administration is clearly treating it as their personal sandbox to play in.

A channel is shut down when it is dropped or expires. There's no grey area about it, really.

Neither happened here.

Cant edit this post on this HN client but just to note, personally I dont have much knowledge of freenode specifically so I dont know if this is exclusively a bad thing because its freenode and not slme other server.

the primary argument here is one of trust

the original creator of the channel gained trust by their userbase to not do untowards things with the feed, like filtering out certain things

then they moved their project elsewhere and left a redirect in the old location

now rasengan has deleted the redirect and pretends nothing has happened, and as for trustworthiness ... note how in the screenshot at the end of the article, humblebot is killed after posting a link to this submission here

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