edit: As of August 2021, the official #chdk channel is on https://libera.chat/A few months back there was some
drama on freenode.
The tl;dr is that someone who was previously marginally involved with freenode took over the network (based on some obscure if not shady grounds) and many of the original staff left.
I thought about moving the CHDK channel at the time, but given the low traffic and the fact the channel still worked and was available through the web interface, it didn't really seem worth the effort.
It appears that freenode now requires creating an account even to use the web client (it's possible this depends on IP, but if so, it applies to some large consumer ISPs). This seems excessive for casual users who just want to ask a question.
Given all this, I'm inclined to move the "official" CHDK presence somewhere else.
Options include
https://libera.chat/ - The people who left freenode
https://www.oftc.net/ - seems to be popular with other open source projects
If we move to one of these, I'd be inclined to officially register the project so people known to the community can have operator rights.
We could also chose to use another service, such as discord. Personally, my preference is IRC. I don't need the bells and whistles, and have no desire to run a proprietary IM client for something that might have one conversation per week.
