As a part of today's services upgrade, we have changed the expiration routine for channels:
When a channel expires - the channel's ops first get a chance to register it, if they don't register it within two weeks or if there are no channel ops, the channel is masskicked and closed for a few moments. After a few moments, the channel gets reopened and the first user who joins it will have 5 minutes to register it. If they don't register it within 5 minutes, they get kickbanned and another user can join and try to register it. If they try to play with the modes or kick ChanServ, the channel will be closed for a random time.
Check out http://www.dal.net/kb/view.php?kb=199 for more information about how the process works.
Any questions, please contact sra(a)dal.net.
For SRA,
-mjs