4 ms·
> 1) In early 2021, the freenode website was altered to begin prominently > mentioning Shells, a company that Andrew co-founded [4]. > > This was not dis
by barneygale 5y ago
> 1) In early 2021, the freenode website was altered to begin prominently
> mentioning Shells, a company that Andrew co-founded [4].
>
> This was not discussed among staff at the time. This caused some
> disruption and considerable confusion among staff for months afterward,
> as to how to handle user inquiries about it, of which we received many.
>
> Ultimately, christel chose to resign rather than explain the situation to
> us.
>
> As an addendum, this is *extremely* irregular. All website advertising is
> usually only found at [5].
>
> [4] https://www.shells.com/l/en-US/team
> [5] https://freenode.net/acknowledgements
This is the incident that kicked everything off.
https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bdd66b8f491 https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd...
- fastball 5y agoDoes anyone have a Wayback Machine link showing what exactly this looked like?
- makomk 5y agoAh, figured it out: it's at the top-right on https://web.archive.org/web/20210228045521/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210228045521/https://freenode.... covered by the Wayback Machine's own toolbar. This is the same location and the same level of prominence as the logo for Private Internet Access, their previous sponsor also associated with Andrew Lee, was placed in for about half a decade between around April 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160413123025/https://freenode.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160413123025/https://freenode.... and January 2021. It certainly wasn't just limited to https://freenode.net/acknowledgements https://freenode.net/acknowledgements so the claim that this is some shocking, unprecedented new practice that justifies the entire admin team quitting and encouraging everyone else to leave and sponsors to do stuff like delete their mail server without warning seems completely unfounded in actual evidence. I guess everyone just decided to trust the Big Reputable Freenet Operators over that evil Andrew guy without bothering to check; though to be fair I only happened to notice because initially the other Private Internet Access link in the footer, which had no Shells equivalent, was the only one I could find and it turned out to go way back.
- fastball 5y agoGreat detective work, thanks. This doesn't really help me understand what the hell is going on though. At this point I think I'm just gonna chalk it up to "IRC Drama" and call it a day.