Since the start of the Mageia.Org project we have used several IRC channels as discussion rooms. The main advantage of this technology is that anyone can get in contact with us without any registration beforehand. Those channels were hosted on the Freenode network until recently. After various events, we decided to change to the new libera.chat irc server.

We were planning a soft transition along with the next Mageia release, but the recent technical problems on Freenode have forced us to make the change now. All of our channels on libera.chat are operational, though users who haven’t used it before will need to register with the irc.libera.chat server. It is currently not possible to connect on #mageia-* channels on Freenode’s servers.

There is a list of the available channels on this wiki page. People who want to ensure no one else uses the same nickname should register
their nickname on the irc.libera.chat server. It still remains to update default server on most of our IRC clients and it may be possible that references to the Freenode network remain in few parts of our documentation. We will try and have the remaining references cleared up quickly.