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While CFN offered a lot of services, the one I spent the most time using was the IRC chat server. At one point I was the Sig Op for the IRC SIG forum.
CFN offered two separate IRC servers. One was exclusively for use by CWRU faculty, staff and students. That server was connected to the primary IRC network on the Internet at that time, EFnet. The other was for use by non-CWRU users (the public) and was an unlinked server, meaning CFN users could only talk to one another on IRC.
While some will say that this was a limitation, I never really saw it that way (or, at least, I don't now). Because the people you were talking to were all CFN users, and primarily right here in the Cleveland area, there was a strong sense of community there. Many of us came out from time to time to go to picnics, usually held in one or another park in Clevelands Metroparks system. As the years wore on, the picnics were more and more sparsely populated and eventually they stopped altogether.
These days, all that really remains of the CFN IRC community is a photo gallery and an email list.