Greetings!
Some of you may have noticed that we changed the #chef and #chef-hacking IRC channels to being invite only. The intention behind this action was to fully consolidate the community into one chat tool - Community Slack.
In October 2016 we migrated the Chef community from IRC to Slack (for more details about why we did that, check out this blog post https://blog.chef.io/2016/10/11/chef-community-slack/). At the time, we planned to eventually phase out both #chef and #chef-hacking in IRC. As of February 27, we completed the phasing out of these channels (and fully committing to Slack) by making the IRC channels read-only. The reason we made them read-only, rather than deleting them, was so that another channel could not be made with the same name.
To quote the great Nathen Harvey, what questions can I answer for you?