IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Today we shall have a look at the various possibilities available for statistics of activity on IRC, should you decide you want to have some pretty graphs detailing the happenings in a channel or on a whole network.

Most programs presented in this article parse logfiles generated by a variety of IRC clients, with the exception of phpDenora/Denora which needs to be run as a network service to gather its stats. However, both solutions can supplement one another as one may gather and display information that the other does or even can not.

The Atheme project just tagged version 5.2.0 of their IRC services package which contains quite a few interesting changes from the previous version, 5.1.1.

Atheme IRC Services Logo

Atheme 5.2.0 introduces a new database format called “OpenSEX” which is available as a technology preview in this release and will be mandatory once Atheme 6.0 is released. According to developer nenolod, the revised format was introduced to “remove legacy stuff and provide an extendable API“.

HostServ gained the OFFER command which allows opers to – surprise – offer vHosts to their users. All of ChanServ and NickServs SET commands are now seperate modules which can be loaded individually, allowing networks fine-grained choosing of which functionality they provide to their users.

chaz of the Anope project announced version 1.9.2 of their services package in the development branch.

New features since the release of 1.9.1-p1 are the “modestacker” which allows setting and removing several modes by services in one line, the binary databases have been replaced by flatfile plaintext ones and an option for persistent channels which keeps BotServ bots in the channel even when it is empty has been added.

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.