With regards to UnrealIRCd, I would like to thank our sponsors and donators for their support. We launched a new sponsorship program this year and are grateful to our monthly sponsors to help us with our monthly hosting costs (we could still use a little help here). Thanks also to all the people contributing to the development, the documentation (wiki), all the official supporters and other people hanging out in our #unreal-support channel. As already mentioned, a big thanks to all the IRC networks, often run by volunteers, all the opers there, the individual IRC users who have been using and enjoying UnrealIRCd! Without your continued support and your feedback we wouldn't be where we are today.
Let me end with this fantastic XKCD comic from several years ago. It highlights what I like most of IRC: it's not one centrally managed and dictated protocol, one network, one brand, like the big social media today. IRC is flexible and gives you choices: you can run your own network with its own community and its own rules, you choose which IRC server software to use and configure it to suit your needs. And to top it off: all your users can choose which IRC client they use to connect to your network, an IRC client set up in the way they like it, with its pros and cons and its never ending tinkering.
If you are interested in some UnrealIRCd history, and some word about the present, then you can continue reading below.
1999 - 2013
UnrealIRCd was founded by Stskeeps in May 1999. I was not involved with the first 2 years of the project, but I remember that UnrealIRCd was already quite popular when UnrealIRCd 3.1.x came out in 2000. In 2001 I joined the development team and together with codemastr and Stskeeps we made UnrealIRCd 3.2.x which took 3 years in total and was maintained for another 12 years. Feature-wise 3.2 brought a completely new configuration file, unlike all other IRC Daemons back then, which made us very flexible. Other notable major features were: support for modules, anti-flood features like channel mode +f and spam filtering. It was UnrealIRCd 3.2.x that made us conquer the market, resulting in a market share of over 50% at that time (in terms of IRC servers deployed). It were crazy times with many networks installing UnrealIRCd, even beta versions. The support channel was completely overwhelmed. Some people may even remember our support bot that we had for several years: the #unreal-support channel was moderated (+m) and upon joining you had to answer a short 5 question quiz with some basic questions in order to get voice (+v) and support. UnrealIRCd 3.2.x was awesome for many years but in the end development slowed down too much.
2014 - 2024
The old UnrealIRCd 3.2.x code base was getting in the way of implementing new things. In 2015 came UnrealIRCd 4 with the help of Heero and nenolod. It had major source code cleanups and server protocol changes, a major configuration file overhaul, improved documentation and a lot of other new features to make things more flexible and an admins life easier. Since then, UnrealIRCd was actively maintained again with regular releases. UnrealIRCd 5 came out in Dec 2019 with security enhancements, a lot more IRCv3 features, channel history and improved websocket support. Followed by UnrealIRCd 6 in Dec 2021 with a modern logging system with (optional) JSON support, again more flexibility, even more modular, an external JSON-RPC interface making a webpanel possible, and more.
The present
Nowadays we have a very modular IRCd, with pretty much all standardized IRCv3 features implemented and great security features. The last 12 months had a number of spam waves and we quickly developed and responded with Central Blocklist and some other services, effectively stoping all efknockr spam. It's good to see us, along with the wider community, staying up to date with the present threats and challenges of today and we have no plans to stop!