I avoided replying to this right away, because I was too angry and creeped out over being called "Jordana." He did this once before in the IRC while at the same time talking about me with male pronouns (he/his) - he knows better, so I took this as targeted harassment, or at the very least disingenuous passive aggressive participation in the trolling games that have been going on lately. He's apologized to me in private since then but I just want to register that joking about hackerspace wars can be fun, but actually gaslighting each other is NOT fun. It can be scary, intimidating, and seriously compromise the accessibility and diversity of our community. As to the substance, he's absolutely right that we have op privileges, but this obscures a few things. For technical background, I encourage people to read about the difference between +F and +o. Your best guide will be logging onto freenode and typing: "/msg chanserv help flags" but more general guides are online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC#Modes https://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml There've been conflicts over how to run the channel. Namely: 1) The person with +F has used his privileges to override the decisions of those with only +o, at several times unquieting people we've quieted. The contexts for these were admittedly controversial and fall on ideological fault lines over how to run an IRC channel in general, so I agree 100% with Andrew that a clear IRC policy is the way to go. For the record, this has been mostly about using oppressive slurs, and my position has been not to tolerate them very much. We happen to have in our community a person who makes it his life's work to push peoples' buttons with slurs, and happened to be doing that IN the IRC channel. He'd also made a habit of typing anatomical words at random times. Form your own opinions. Again, the solution to this may be more about having a clear policy, than who enforces it. 2) The person with +F has acted in bad faith. He flooded the channel with ascii art of an ejaculating swastika and claimed it was an "accident", which would be a no-brainer kban in most any channel. When asked to share +F with other people, his response was to vandalize the Sudoroom wiki to say he is the "leader" ( http://sudoroom.org/wiki/Community_Structure ). In the meantime, he shares +F with a friend of his who hadn't been to Sudoroom since summer 2012 and didn't even seem to know anybody's name. They'd also set the +S (successor) flag for a person who is emphatically NOT a Sudoroom member and has even publically criticized Sudoroom. This sent a clear message to the rest of us that we were dealing with people who saw us as a joke; didn't respect our community; and that there was little we could do about it in the short term. That mistrust has colored all of the talk over IRC privileges since then, and has only escalated since these same people came to our 1/16 meeting and made it significantly longer (by complaining about the meeting being long!), and also filled our meeting agenda notes with things like "fuck", "poop" and "this is why you guys never hack anything". I'm not bitter or anything, just trying to bring out some of the subtext here for those not following why things are happening the way they are. I think the best formulation for IRC rules that everyone can agree on would be something like: we want the IRC channel to accurately reflect the atmosphere at the physical sudoroom space. To me, that nicely encompasses all the many behavioral problems and general do's and don'ts. Honestly the room itself has rarely had the kind of problems the channel has, because people tend to be a lot more decent to each other face to face, and because it self-selects for people who care about the community.