(This covers what Atheme services as used on freenode will do if all founder (+F) accounts of a channel are dropped. It does not go into any staff policies on related matters. In particular, single-# channels have policies that services cannot reasonably implement¹ as they commonly involve talking to actual people.)
For single-# channels, the freenode-staff role account is always chosen as successor; normal channel successor logic does not apply in this case.
Otherwise, the "best" user will be selected from the channel's ACL according to the following criteria:
- They may not have the
+bflag. This ensures AKICKed users will never inherit a channel. - They need to be able to accomodate the channel registration; users who already have 30 channels registered cannot inherit a channel unless they have been granted the
RegNoLimitflag.²