Looking back on UnrealIRCd in 2024

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

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 
<https://forums.unrealircd.org/viewtopic.php?t=9363>, 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 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/ASN> support, several new properties in 
security groups <https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Security-group_block> 
and a lot of new functions in crules 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Crule>, more flexible ban user { } 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Ban_user_block> and require 
authentication { } 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Require_authentication_block> blocks 
because they now take a mask item 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Mask_item> for matching, a new extban 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Extended_bans#Group_4:_special> 
~inherit to make people banned in one channel also banned in another, 
auto-vhost support was new, set::restrict-commands 
<https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/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 <https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/TLS_Ciphers_and_protocols> to 
only allow TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 protocols and requiring ciphers that 
provide Forward Secrecy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 
<https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=irc.unrealircd.org&s=40.86.218.96>(*). 
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 
<https://forums.unrealircd.org/viewtopic.php?t=9353>. 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 
<https://shop.unrealircd.org>, 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 
<https://www.ircstats.org/servers> we can see UnrealIRCd is still going 
strong in terms of servers deployed. That's all thanks to the people 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.