Absolutely this brings back memories of the channel takeover battles that used to happen on EFNet back in the days before nickserv and chanserv, or for that matter freenode.net but that was kind of the EFNet culture and the actual ops rarely got involved with individual channels and communities struggles unless it affected the overall network stability.

Freenode was however supposed be run by adults and relatively drama free, i dont know really i kind of drifted away from IRC around the time freenode.net was formed.