Absolutely confused....have no idea what bitlbee is and why I can't use Colloquy like i used to, please help

[dperkel@…]

I can imagine that no developer will want to read this as it's not a bug ticket and it comes from someone who is a complete novice to IRC. Today I had to reinstall a bunch of applications including Adium and Colloquy. I went to join a chatroom by setting up a connection to irc.freednode.net. Right away I was taken to something called "bitlbee" which I had never heard of. When I try to join any other room colloquy won't do it. So, i figured I would try to make sense of this bitlbee thing to see if that was the problem. Here is my latest chat:

[1:10pm] You left the chat by being disconnected from the server. [2:15pm] You rejoined the room. [2:15pm] root: Welcome to the BitlBee gateway! [2:15pm] root: If you've never used BitlBee before, please do read the help information using the help command. Lots of FAQs are answered there. [2:17pm] dan: help [2:17pm] root: These are the available help subjects: [2:17pm] root: quickstart - A short introduction into BitlBee [2:17pm] root: commands - All available commands and settings [2:17pm] root: away - About setting away states [2:17pm] root: smileys - A summary of some non-standard smileys you might find and fail to understand [2:17pm] root: groupchats - How to work with groupchats on BitlBee [2:17pm] root: You can read more about them with help <subject> [2:17pm] root: BitlBee is written by Wilmer van der Gaast together with Jelmer Vernooij, Maurits Dijkstra and others. Bugs can be reported at  http://bugs.bitlbee.org/. [2:17pm] root: For other things than bug reports, you can join #BitlBee on OFTC (irc.oftc.net) (OFTC, *not* FreeNode!) and flame us right in the face. [2:58pm] dan: quickstart [2:58pm] root: Unknown command: quickstart. Please use help commands to get a list of available commands. [2:58pm] dan: quickstart [2:58pm] root: Unknown command: quickstart. Please use help commands to get a list of available commands. [2:58pm] dan: help [2:58pm] root: These are the available help subjects: [2:58pm] root: quickstart - A short introduction into BitlBee [2:58pm] root: commands - All available commands and settings [2:58pm] root: away - About setting away states [2:58pm] root: smileys - A summary of some non-standard smileys you might find and fail to understand [2:58pm] root: groupchats - How to work with groupchats on BitlBee [2:58pm] root: You can read more about them with help <subject> [2:58pm] root: BitlBee is written by Wilmer van der Gaast together with Jelmer Vernooij, Maurits Dijkstra and others. Bugs can be reported at  http://bugs.bitlbee.org/. [2:58pm] root: For other things than bug reports, you can join #BitlBee on OFTC (irc.oftc.net) (OFTC, *not* FreeNode!) and flame us right in the face. [2:58pm] dan: commands [2:58pm] root: Unknown command: commands. Please use help commands to get a list of available commands.

I don't understand this at all. I type "help" and get a list of commands. Except none of the commands work. What is going on? What is this thing?

[wilmer]

I think freednode is a typo, most likely you're trying to connect to irc.net which runs a BitlBee server. We indeed don't have anything to do with this...