"For an explanation of why nobody is here, see https://blahblahblah."

I'm not an IRC guy but I'm sure URLs are fairly common in topics. A human might still get offended but this will get past a bot.

Heck, even something like "For information about channel etiquette, see https:/blahblahblah" would do. It just turns out that "channel etiquette" is to move to a different channel.

It only has to hold for a little while anyhow. I'm sure there's going to be a long tail of people logging in for the first time in months and wondering what happened, but by now the majority probably already know, if not the vast majority.

What about setting the channel topic to a link to your own documentation where it states how you should access the IRC channel? And maybe also a bot as someone else suggested, that reminds you to... read the channel topic. If they are going to scrape every single link in the channel topics and look for libera.chat links then there is not much you can do, people will eventually migrate.

> If they are going to scrape every single link in the channel topics and look for libera.chat links then there is not much you can do

There's a lot you can do, there's a bunch of anti-scraping techniques like printing the "libera" using JavaScript.

IRC channel topics are plain text. They don't parse JavaScript.

I know. GPs solution was to point them to a URL which you control, with a suggestion that FN owners would go as far as to scrape these.

Edit: they are obviously already filtering the topics themselves.

Set up a support / resources landing page on your web site and set the IRC topic to point to that. People who connect to freenode will figure it out pretty quickly. Generally a good idea to always have a pointer to a page you control like this any time you're using someone else's server/service. You never know when something like this is going to happen and it provides you a way to communicate when/if it does.

Put in a bot that responds to every user who has spoken for the first time in X timeframe with NOTICE about moving to new location?

I don't have a source I can cite, but I'm hearing indirectly that freenode's current policy is that a bot doing something like that is not allowed :/

Any method of mentioning that the channel isn't an official channel anymore is illegal by new policy

Ironic that the network's name has the words "free" in them.

The way Andrew Lee is acting, he sounds like he's more the North Korean version of Korea...

You mean the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

Yup, sounds about right.

its times like these when you ignore the rules

And it's time like these where you immediately get banned for ignoring said rules.

Oh good grief, really? I had gone for the "Unofficial Foo Channel, see http://foo.org/blah" :/

Postgresql simply just links to their site which mentions Libera, and that community is enormous.

> I was able to get founder access back by asking nicely (through gritted teeth) on #freenode-services and now I am trying to work out how I indicate to users that they should look elsewhere, without freenode taking any further action.

Why do you need to do that though? Freenode and all other IRC servers are full of channels where people hang out and talk about projects without maintainers owning them and pushing people around. This is, after all, the main plus of IRC.

Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people deciding to stay on Freenode alone.

In the long term, you are absolutely right. It's perfectly reasonable for people to want to have a #gentoo or #ubuntu or whatever, channel on Freenode. I also think it's reasonable for projects to have some time to disambiguate where the official one is.

For my project specifically, our IRC traffic is very low - there are a dozen or so lurkers and then people who come in briefly after seeing the channel mentioned on our website/docs, to ask questions. I've updated all of those things, but I want to leave a message in the channel topic for people who already have it in their IRC client, to see, so they don't think I've completely abandoned them.

My solution for now is to have the topic say that it's an unofficial channel in which people are welcome to discuss things, and then a URL to the section of our website that details how to get help, which links to Libera :)

> Just leave Freenode and advertise your presence on your website/GitHub or other project channels. Leave people deciding to stay on Freenode alone.

Because it looks like an official channel? Having a topic telling people where they can find the official channel is not bothering people: most people don't know where to go and are only on freenode because thats where they think they should be.

The position you advocate is ridiculous.

If the official channel is moving, prohibiting that channel from telling thier users where the new official channel will be is incredibly user hostile.

I can't believe any project would ever want to stay on Freenode after behavior like this.

Eggdrop with auto-greet message?

Eggdrop is still a thing?

Damn. It's been for ever.

We're talking about IRC here, after all...

.... Haven't been active on IRC since 1996.

.... Can still understand exactly what is being talked about here.

Maybe just make a pastebin or something that explains the move and link users to that instead?