I offered to sponsor servers, to help with coding, etc many many times. My emails were ignored. When I popped into #freenode to ask, they said "We assumed you wanted something in return so we ignored them".

I also offered to help with the abuse. I've asked several times for details of abuse. I haven't been able to get concrete details on what abuse happens, when, what they have to do etc. The staff are incredibly secretive - unlike other networks, they don't link servers, their staff run everything, and I believe this was one of the reasons - they want complete control over everything including web clients.

Out of 500 or so people @peak times, I think the abuse level was really low. Also it's easily solved with a WEBIRC setup which we have with a large number of IRC networks (Which we never hear from, because abuse is handled by WEBIRC and their own systems as with direct connections).

I hope freenode will decide to reconsider, but they clearly want people to use their own web client, rather than mibbit. It would have been nice to at least give people some notice rather than just shut off access.