Eggdrop 1.6.20 has been released and marks the first release put together by the new developer  team.

Eggdrop is a mature IRC bot that has been in development since 1993 and this new release once again brings new features, lots of bugfixes and enhancements.

For starters, Eggdrop can now be compiled against TCL 8.6 and amongst “numerous minor issues and potential crashes fixed” there also have been issues with the 64-bit binaries crashing on FreeBSD and NetBSD resolved.

Interesting new features include full CIDR support for userhosts and modes b, e and l. Channel sync time has been improved by querying aforementioned modes at once and removing “redundant commands”. The charset detection on Telnet and DCC partylines now works better and according to developer thommey you should “never have to use .fixcodes” again.

The TCL event loop has been replaced and now allows events to be triggered without a delay – previous versions had a minimum delay of one second between TCL events, no matter how low the timer has been set.

Security issues resolved since 1.6.19+ctcpfix are proper checking of the .+chan command which could have changed the need-* channel settings in the past.

If you’re running 1.6.20rc2 you can keep using it as there where no changes between it and the final release, others might want to update: The updated sourcecode can be grabbed from their homepage, the full changelog is supplied in docs/Changes1.6 and a summary of the most important changes is available here.

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It took almost 2 years for a new release, and even then it consists mostly of bugfixes of which one fixes a serious issue.

Version 1.6.19 of the popular IRC bot Eggdrop fixes a buffer overflow issue in the server module. It is exploitable by a malicious server. As long as the bot connects to a reputable server it should be OK.

IRC-Junkie tried to contact Guppy with a few questions but has received no reply so far, partly explaining the delay in reporting this new release.

A list of all updates according to the updates.txt file:

- Update the recommended TCL version to 8.5

- Updated Copyright dates

- added [sL] and thommey to the AUTHORS file

- load blowfish by default

- added a TCL to handle the PONG :<cookie> junk on some EFnet servers

- add a simple TCL to handle the PASS <numbers> junk on some Undernet servers

- add support for chanmode +T

- CTCP parsing was broken by the servmsg.c buffer overflow patch

- Fixed a couple of typos in the FEATURES file.

- Fixed two buffer overflows in servmsg.c (CVE-2007-2807).

- Fixed compatibility problems with certain time_t implementations.

- Complete raw traffic wasn’t getting logged in some cases; only the raw command itself was. Fixed.

After valentines day, mothers’ day, secretary day (got to get me one) and you-know-what-else day, we also have bot day!

Not sure what organization or person is behind the invention of this one, but heck, bots deserve all the recognition they can get! Performing un-thankful jobs of maintaining statistics, opping/voicing users, setting topics and a whole range of other tasks we make them able to with expanding them with scripts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Except of course, for those moments where the shell is down or the wrong process is killed …

They sure make our online experience a whole lot easier and richer!

Cheers to Horcsog for the haads up =)