The dancer IRC server was written for the Freenode Network, and designed with FN philosophy in mind. As such, it may have features which are at odds with other networks and their philosophies.
The Freenode Net philosophy has several components. FN exists to provide interactive services to projects and groups involved with "Open Source, Open Technology and Open Information." We work to provide an interaction environment in which free software community members can improve their skills in the areas of communication and coordination of effort. We also try to provide an environment which serves to introduce new participants to the free software community.
The basic principles of FN are:
Community members benefit from better access to each other. Putting a number of projects in close proximity in an interactive environment creates linkages between developers and projects, and helps community members take better advantage of each other's work.
Communication and coordination skills are important to community projects. Free software and open source work because the paradigm works. Developers and community members are not unusually gifted at project coordination and communication. But improving those skills can make projects work better.
Friendly interaction is more efficient than flaming. Calm, relaxed discourse without angry contention provides for better exchange of information. Flaming produces situations in which the listener must contend with the state of his or her emotions at least as much as with the comprehension of a speaker's comments.
Open source developers are self-driven. No one guarantees your work will be used, but only you decide whether a project is worth doing. There is no single right approach to any coding or support problem, and friendly competition is a fundamentally good thing.
The free software community is small, and needs to grow. Many valuable projects chronically lack skilled, motivated developers with time to devote to them. Our potential developer base includes programmers in all fields and disciplines, and both students and working professionals. Our potential user base includes individuals and organizations standing to benefit from software projects we successfully pursue. The community must continue to grow.
Free software is about the software. Free software and open source were not born in the recent venture-capital, pre-IPO environment. Our roots are in coders coding software for the benefit of themselves and their organizations, and for the pleasure of producing quality work. It is completely legitimate to profit monetarily from coding and supporting free and open applications. Corporate sponsors of open source projects are welcome on FN. It's time, though, for the community to get back to its roots.
The FN IRC network provides a controlled environment in which open projects can communicate between developers and users. To this end, FN is centrally maintained, and operators are expected to try and resolve situations without actually exercising their power when possible. They are also expected to stay out of channel politics and arguments, so don't bother asking them to intervene if you disagree with the people who run a channel. They won't.
FN runs a full services implementation, which allows nicks and channels to be registered and protected by the server, thusly making channel takeovers largely impossible, while maintaining a consistant interface for channels to be managed.
If an individual has somehow gained ops on a channel, then the channel founder, or people with an appropriate level of access, can handle it themselves with chanserv; refer to the dancer users guide for details. If somebody has managed to take founder access (by guessing the founder password, or whatever), then the original founder should come to channel #freenode ASAP so that the situation can be resolved.