This worked for years, until eris.berkeley.edu altered their server's configuration to allow *anyone* to hook up a server. No restrictions, no passwords, and no limit on the number of connections. This attracted a huge-for-the-time number of bad actors, filling the network with spam and hackery. Eventually, Eris was silenced/quarantined by most hub servers. These formed Eris-Free Net, or EFnet. A-Net whithered away into irrelevance, and EFnet became the primary IRC network.