“Due to recent events several ZiRC staff have decided to part ways with ZiRC,” David announced on the ZiRC website. Following a series of events this week the majority of admins (including David) decided to leave the network and form a new network named synIRC. Left behind is ZiRC with just a single server.
The events that eventually led to the departure of the admins had a start in early May of this year. Due to several events Prince, the owner of ZiRC’s domain, the server housing service, and co-owner of the network, resigned from the network.
In July things escalated as admin Eien explains: “On the evening of 05 July 2007, prince returned, tampered with services, added a former member of staff (who was not well regarded by the rest of staff and is generally believed to be an asshole) as an oper on his server with the netadmin flag set, blew away the DNS for ZIRC.ORG completely, removing the host records necessary for email to function, and setting irc.zirc.org to only point to his server, avalon.” Eien took over Prince’s positions when he resigned. “When he finally talked to me, he said he was willing to start a war for ownership of the network but he never explained why or, really, what the hell was going on. He demanded the SU password for services which I provided. However, his tampering with services rendered my SU password unusable. So he decided to restore services to a backup before his resignation in May.”
Although the following day Prince said he would discuss matters with Eien, that eventually did not occur, which was the limit for many admins.
“Prince has a reputation of being drunk and doing odd things but most of the time they were minor or easily fixed. In this case, he completely trashed his own network. As long as he has access to the network (which he will always have since he owns the domain name), the network, its staff, and, most importantly, its users, will always be at the mercy of prince’s whims. Therefore ZiRC was no longer a stable or optimal environment for our users,” Eien explains.
The users who have moved to the new network have been positive so far, according to Eien. “I’ve seen several offers from users to help out that I hadn’t seen on ZiRC so I’d say it’s a good sign so far.”
Since the split there has not been any contact between synIRC’s management and ZiRC. “Personally, I’d like terms between synIRC and ZiRC to be, at the least, civil and respectful. However, I do not expect there to be good relations between synIRC and ZiRC in the future,” Eien said.
The new network set itself a list of tasks. The first is to establish a “charter or equivalent thereof”, a proper website and infrastructure, and “the long-term future plan is really to provide the best service we can to our users. Gaining users obviously couldn’t hurt.”
“I’d like to thank our users for their faith in us to make the jump from an old, established network like ZiRC to a completely new one. And I’d like to apologize to them if the split has inconvenienced them in any way. It’s also sad to see ZiRC go like this. It had been a good home for many years,” Eien ends.
IRC-Junkie tried to contact ZiRC as well but had no reply so far.