I must say I'm shocked when I see some of the comments in this thread.
DALNet is/has been under massive DDOS attacks. The general sweeping statement that 'aparently the Dalnet administrators either don't care, or can't find anyone with the brain enough to track these attacks' is complete rubbish; these people have to pay for the bandwidth (which is next to useless when it's being flooded with an attack) and the hardware which the server software needs. It really is next to impossible to track these attacks, as they are coming from hundreds (often thousands) of computers, DALNet are not making this up. The sad fact is that DALNet is getting hit hard, and there is next to nothing that can be done about it.
So yes, maybe DALNet does suck, I often find it difficult to find a working server, but please take the time to remember that it's a script kiddie making it suck, and it simply isn't their fault.
-Ribs.