I happened to experience an interesting incident not long ago related to the subject. After a week or two of uptime, I restarted my PC. As it happened, I recon

I happened to experience an interesting incident not long ago related to the subject. After a week or two of uptime, I restarted my PC. As it happened, I reconnected while Freenode was in the middle of a spam wave. Something mistook my client for a spam bot and banned my IP. Oh well, "and nothing of value was lost" I thought and deleted Freenode from my server list. But, later that day, I discovered that I could not connect to other IRC networks: the Freenode ban was propagated to DroneBL, and then picked up by other IRC networks. I was effectively blacklisted from all of IRC. This also affected some services I was providing to a few communities. I did get the ban removed, but after this incident, I would not recommend anyone to connect to Freenode at all. The new administration doesn't seem to have sufficient experience to fill their present position suitably.