I hope there's a good postmortem on this in 5-10 years that explains what on earth all this nonsense is about, because it makes literally no sense.<p>Buy an IRC network, fine. If you want to use the domain for something else, just turn off the servers and do it. There's no need for this absurdly complex, Rube Goldberg-esque process of pissing everyone off, then impersonating services, then dropping the services database entirely, then partitioning the network and joining people to a new network, and pissing more people off, and passive aggressive global messages, and...<p>I cannot wrap my head around what they're even trying to <i>do</i> at this point. I've been on IRC in some form another for the majority of my adult life (including running my own IRC network for many years, starting out with some SE/30s), I'm quite tolerant of random stuff going on, but I literally cannot find any sense at all in what the new owners are trying to do.<p>It's like they had a great party going at their house, a few people started leaving, and then they started waving around a gallon of gas and a lighter, threatening to burn the house down if anyone else left. And people, reasonably enough, continued to leave. So, i guess this stage is the "And they lit the house on fire, but moved all their friends to the shed and pretended it was still the house" part of the analogy...