UnrealIRCd celebrates its 25th birthday

[Bram M. <sy...@un...>]

Hi everyone,

This month UnrealIRCd celebrates its 25th birthday. IRC changed over all 
those years. There's a clear consolidation, with fewer IRC networks now 
than before, but IRC is still alive and kicking. That's in part due to a 
persistent user base but also very much thanks to all those people who 
keep IRC up to date, people making IRC server software (not just 
UnrealIRCd), people running IRC networks, the IRCv3 working group 
<https://ircv3.net/>, IRC clients that tap in a different market than 
traditional text-mode and desktop IRC clients, clients like IRCCloud 
<https://www.irccloud.com/>, The lounge <https://thelounge.chat> and 
Kiwi IRC <https://kiwiirc.com> to name a few. Everyone is trying to make 
IRC more intuitive, more modern, so new users can appreciate IRC as well.

With regards to UnrealIRCd, I would like to thank our sponsors and 
donators <https://www.unrealircd.org/index/donations> for their support. 
We launched a new sponsorship program 
<https://forums.unrealircd.org/viewtopic.php?t=9353> 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.

XKCD comic #1782 "Team Chat"


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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/What%27s_new_in_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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/What%27s_new_in_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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/What%27s_new_in_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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/UnrealIRCd_webpanel>, 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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/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!

Best regards,

Bram Matthys ("Syzop")