Looking back on 2024

[Syzop]

It's the end of the year, so why not take an opportunity to look back on it. This year UnrealIRCd celebrated its 25th year birthday, which is an amazing achievement that goes all the way back to the days of Stskeeps and codemastr.

Nine UnrealIRCd releases this year
2024 brought us five regular UnrealIRCd releases and four dot releases to quickly fix some bugs. Feature-wise we got ASN support, several new properties in security groups and a lot of new functions in crules, more flexible ban user { } and require authentication { } blocks because they now take a mask item for matching, a new extban ~inherit to make people banned in one channel also banned in another, auto-vhost support was new, set::restrict-commands with a new option channel-create for managing who may create new channels, and so on.

Security was increased
Almost exactly a year ago (29-dec-2023) we changed the default SSL/TLS settings to only allow TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 protocols and requiring ciphers that provide Forward Secrecy. Later in 2024 we dropped support for AES in old CBC mode in the default settings, only allowing AES in GCM mode. Thanks to all this, Qualys SSL Labs gives a solid A rating(*). On *NIX we have the handy "./unrealircd upgrade" command and we already do PGP/GPG verification of the release in there. This year we added support to also do PGP/GPG verification for hot and cold patching (those are used for quickly fixing issues, usually without a restart, thanks to modules).

Sponsors and keeping the project sustainable
Also new in 2024 is the sponsorship program. We are happy people stepped in to cover the hosting costs. In particular we would like to thank IRCCloud for becoming a Platinum Sponsor, Réseau IRC Zeolia and Deutscher-Chat as Bronze Sponsors, and Dex, Jellis and Rafael Grether as Iron sponsors. Single donations are also still appreciated and so are the sponsors that contribute but wish to remain anonymous. Thanks to all this, and a little income from the shop, we cover almost 75% of the monthly running costs, which is great!

The community
Finally, I would like to thank the community: everyone who helps other people on irc.unrealircd.org and the forums. Everyone who contributes as a coder, translator or to the documentation/wiki. And naturally, all the admins/IRCOps who continue to use UnrealIRCd and invest time into growing their own IRC community, often each with their own niche, tinkering and tweaking their setup. On IRCStats we can see UnrealIRCd is still going strong in terms of servers deployed. That's all thanks to the admins who run UnrealIRCd and the people who chat there.

(*) SSL Labs does not allow specifying a port like 6697, however irc.unrealircd.org also listens on port 443. We do that for easy websocket testing and hence it can be analyzed.

[CrazyCat]

Thanks Syzop for the digest of 2024.
I whish you the best for 2025 and a long live for UnrealIRCD !

Bonne année de France !