While I agree that he was being a complete jerk to the volunteer, there is some truth to this. Freenode has a policy of reserving the "main" channel namespace (only one hash like #bittorrent or #wikipedia) to officially registered groups. This process is carried out by filling out a long form and waiting for approval. Due to lack of volunteers willing and able to clear out the queue, it takes maybe half a year at minimum. It's nice that Freenode has a system for officially registering groups, but they really should not be actively enforcing rules relying on that if they have no plans to reliably process the gigantic queue.