Closing an IRC server is always difficult as people tend to connect directly to the server’s IP, and anyway just changing the dns won’t make people reconnect immediatly. Many people stay connected for days, if not for weeks.
That’s why closing a server must be done at least 2 weeks before. We first remove the server from the DNS pool, then wait one week, then start sending notices and private messages to remaining people to notify them.
Right now we are at the “one week” mark. You can see the user count has decreased quite a lot.
Most of the users were first directed to our second european node, however the new US node is now open and people are being sent there too. I will implement support for GeoIP in SimpleDNSd soon, so people will be directed to either server based on informations available from their DNS server (the ISP dns server tend to be in the same country as the user is, for others like google’s 8.8.8.8 I really don’t know how things will end).
