The Battle.net Team has been working to improve the user's experience over the past 8 months. To that end, we are changing the amount of access that telnet clients will have on Battle.net chat channels. On Monday, June 4, we shall be restricting telnet user's access to just three channels, Blizzard Tech Support, Open Tech Support, and Blizzard Public. The last channel is a new channel specifically created for the telnet user. All full retail versions of Blizzard's games will be able to enter this channel. We anticipate that this change will improve communication on the chat channels.

"Improve communication on the chat channels" is a little dubious, since it accomplishes one good thing: it removes the bots who would sit in the channels users are sent to when logging in and spam ads, try out scams to get passwords, etc. I have a feeling this was the primary reason for the limit of access. In my opinion, there could be only one other reason for the change, and that would be because Blizzard plans to finally implement some of the changes that have been rumored of for a while: buddy lists, user tracking, and increased functionality of Battle.Net. These are the things that bots have been providing for years now to clans and organizations on Battle.Net, along with the protection of official Clan channels. Now, bots cannot be used by clans to help people get together online, and some legendary Battle.Net bots such as DainBramage of the Trading Post channel have seen the end of their usefulness.

Also, another popular use of telnet access is with chat clients, so that users who wanted to get online and chat with friends can do so without loading up the games. There could be many man-hours returned to employers since their employees can't get online to chat during the day. :) This is gone now as well. Blizzard is mum on WHY they are implementing the change. Naturally, a petition has gone online to protest the change. All I can say is that if this was done for the 5% of bot users who used their bots for spamming, scamming, and useless channel wars, and if you've ever used a bot for one of those purposes, you suck. Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us.