If you haven’t heard yet – pretty much *all* of the staff over at Freenode IRC resigned the other day after it was clear the service would be run under new management. I won’t pretend to know the full details of what transpired that led up to this, but long story short, it seems a single individual pulled some shady shit and is conducting a hostile takeover of Freenode. The entire staff resigning and starting their own IRC service speaks volumes. There’s a lot of postings online about this, but this Gist from a former staff member explains quite a bit – https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bdd66b8f491.

In light of this, I’m moving #hardfought, #evilhack, and other associated channels over to Libera, a new IRC network started and managed by the Freenode staff that resigned. All of the channels most of you visit for NetHack-related things are already present and functional at Libera, including #nethack. The channel bots for #hardfought and #evilhack aren’t over on the Libera channels yet, but they soon will be. The intent is to fully cutover before the start of Junethack, so just a matter of days. I’ll still be parked in #hardfought on Freenode for a bit afterwards, but I expect the transition to Libera will be permanent in short order.

See you over on Libera IRC.