IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

William “nenolod” Pitcock, founder and long-time operator of the DroneBL DNSBL, announced via a posting on their mailinglist that he’ll discontinue his work on the service “due to time and emotional constraints” “effective immediately”.

DroneBL DNS Blacklist Logo

The DNS Blacklist is one of the few that is especially meant to be used for IRC Networks.

He writes that coming to the decision to quit having an active role was not an easy process but he deems the project mature enough that the community “can steer it’s future development focus” and notes that he’ll continue to provide hosting for the blacklist until the community has made appropriate “alternative hosting arrangements”.

The team developing the Atheme IRC services just tagged version 5.1.0 of their services package.

The new release brings a lot of bugfixes, feature additons and enhancements as well as a slew of modules that have been contributed to the project by other developers.

Also, a few changes have been made to the available IRCd protocols, mostly improvements and additions concerning InspIRCd support but also a new module which provides support for the Ithildin IRCd has been added. Support for the legacy hyperion daemon, previously used on freenode, has been dropped and support for ShadowIRCd has been updated.

ratbox-services, the services package for ircd-ratbox, have released version 1.2.4 in their stable tree.

ratbox services logo

Version 1.2.4 is mainly a bugfix release, one feature addition that this new version got is that you now can specify both the UID/GID and the path it chroots to on startup with a parameter.

Other than that, some inconsistencies with ChanServ enforcing topics have been rectified and it now “enforces topics whenever it is in the channel”. The handling of read-errors received from servers has been fixed as well as the configure-options of both MySQL and PostgreSQL which now take a path to a binary that will provide the compiler with information it needs to compile the respective support in.

Anope developer chaz announced the immediate availability of a new Anope services release in their stable branch which is now at version 1.8.4.

Anope Logo

The new release contains a number of “fixes and some further compatibility with InspIRCd 1.2″ but also some new features like tracking of deletes and clearings of XOP access lists and tracking of permanent channels have been introduced.

chaz reveals that there will be some new functionality for their module repository shortly which will “mass build” modules for each new release so prospective users don’t need to rely on the modules author to supply a pre-compiled version of his work.

Those who closely follow either projects development will have noticed a few “odd” looking commits to their sourcecode in the past few days.

The commits all concerned InspIRCds m_invisible module which provides similar functionality as the old mode +I in UnrealIRCd 3.1.x.

Quoting the InspIRCd wiki page about m_invisible the module

adds support for quiet (invisible) opers. A quiet oper is invisible to normal users on channels. This can be used for surveillence of botnet channels, statistics bots, etc. Note that other opers CAN see invisible opers; +Q only hides the oper from non-opers.