IRCd Upgrade!

It is with great pleasure and much fanfare that we can now announce that the recent maintenance to the entire QuakeNet network was completed successfully. The QuakeNet network was recently upgraded to the latest version of our IRCd software, codenamed 'snircd', which is still based on IRCu from the lovely people on the Undernet IRC network. Snircd is a significant upgrade to the network and replaces our previous version, codenamed 'asuka'. The upgrade provides a large number of new features accessible to you, our dedicated userbase, to play with as well a multitude of other behind the scenes enhancements. The highlights are detailed below, which include new channel modes and some new commands:

Channel mode changes:

Channel mode +m (updated):

When the channel is moderated (channel mode +m) regular users (users without a voice or ops) cannot change their nicknames.

Channel mode +r (updated):
When +r is set on a channel (only authenticated users can join) any regular users (users without a voice or ops) in the channel who are not authenticated are unable to send anything to the channel and additionally are unable to change nicknames.

Channel mode +M (new):
The NEW channel mode +M allows unauthenticated users to join a channel, but does not allow them to send (speak) to the channel or change nicknames until they authenticate.

Channel mode +T (new):
The NEW channel mode +T disallows any multi-target messages that are sent with PRIVMSG (normal messages) or NOTICE. This blocks (for example) anything sent by /AMSG with certain clients from showing in channels with +T set.

Command changes:

/AUTH command (new):

All QuakeNet servers now support an easy to remember AUTH command. This command can be used instead of the old method to authenticate to our main network service, Q. For example:

/MSG Q@Cserve.quakenet.org auth [username] [password]
can now be:

/AUTH [username] [password]
This update also reduces confusion in remembering what you have to authenticate to and increases security.

/SILENCE command (updated):
The /SILENCE command now supports multiple hostmasks in a single command, for example:

/SILENCE +!@.host.com,-nick!@,+!ident@*
/SILENCE now also supports exceptions by prefixing the hostmask with a “~” character, for example:

/SILENCE +~nick!@
will allow you to see messages and invites from that user even if their host matches another ‘silenced’ hostmask. /SILENCE now supports CIDR masks to silence a large block of IP addresses for example:

/SILENCE +!@12.34.56.67/24
Please note that only CIDR masks that are /16 and greater (up to /32) are allowed for security reasons. /SILENCE now supports authnames using the +x hostname format to silence users by their Q account name, for example:

/SILENCE +!@authname.users.quakenet.org

/WHO command (updated):
The /WHO command now has two additional flags to compliment our other upgrades, these are the ‘a’ flag to match authnames (account names), which for example can be used as:

/WHO [authname] a
which will return a normal WHO reply for any user with that authname. The ‘a’ flag can also be used on conjunction with the other /WHO flags such as:

/WHO [authname] a%h
and so on. The other additional flag added is the ‘d’ flag which lists users hidden by the delayed join (channel modes +D and +d) and can be used as:

/WHO [#channel] d

/LIST command (updated):
The /LIST command now supports pattern matching for channel names, for example:

/LIST #channel
matches any channel with the string ‘channel’ in the name. Whereas:

/LIST !#channel
matches any channel without the string ‘channel’ in the name.

Please use “/LIST help” to see a full list of options for the /LIST command.

Other changes:

Ident rules relaxed:

The minimum requirement for idents have been relaxed to the following rules:

>

• Only one '-', '_', or '.' is allowed (or two, if not consecutive), but not as the first char

• No other special characters are allowed

• Name must contain at least one letter

And that’s all folks!

We hope you enjoy the new features. Until the next mass-update, remember to drink your milk and to be kind to molluscs.