v0.8.1, Packages And Direction

27 Jun 2017

Hey everyone, this is the first post on the new News section of our site! I’m planning to make a post each time we release a new version of Oragono, so people can keep an eye on server updates just by following the RSS feed here: feed.xml

Let’s talk about the new release. You can find it [here]. v0.8.1 adds:

• A bunch of snomasks to help opers keep better oversight of what’s going on on their servers.

• A draft channel renaming capability (the IRCv3 proposal can be found here).

• The ability to kill matching users when you apply a ban with DLINE or KLINE.

• Various other fixes and minor improvements.

As well, thanks to Sean Enck (@enckse) we have a new Arch Linux AUR package here. This should help users on Arch more easily install Oragono for the first time!

We’re also now a Github organisation, which holds Oragono as well as some of the dependencies we’ve taken, modified and used.

In terms of future direction, there’s a bunch of features I have planned. Let me quickly talk about each of them:

• IP Cloaking: This is, rather than displaying IP addresses of connected clients you’d display something like 4yfdxndgf3.jpbkkfnt3g.fhbk6ukspg.5jqti37n7o.test-cloaked instead. I’m pretty interested in this, and I’d say this is something I really want in the next release.

• XLINE ‘Insane’ Protections: Basically, this stops you from accidentally banning half your network with a single command. With this protection, you’d need to add the INSANE paramter to your DLINE/KLINE command, if it bans more than x% of your network’s users.

• DNSBL (DNS Blacklist) Support: This is another one that most other IRCds out there already have, but Oragono doesn’t. I think it makes sense to implement this within a few releases, but figuring out exactly how configurable to make it is gonna be the challenge.

• Email Verification for Accounts: Right now, Oragono only supports registing for accounts with no sort of verification. I’ve been planning this for a while but it’s still honestly on the backburner. Does anyone have a pressing need for this, and how should I implement it? Standard SMTP, using a mail daemon such as sendmail on the machine itself? If you’d like this, feel free to reach out and tell me!

• Unit Testing: I want to start on this, but it’s difficult to dive into it. I might look into this properly after the next release.

• Extbans: I really want to do this, but it’s on the backburner right now.

• REST API and Web Interface: Nice, but entirely on the backburner right now.

• S2S Linking Protocol: Heh. No time soon at all, look at DanielOaks/dcmi for more on this.

So that’s how things are at the moment, and where I plan taking things forwards. Have any other ideas or want to send me feedback? Feel free to pop into our IRC channel (#oragono on Freenode) or send me an email.

Thanks again to everyone submitting bugs, fixes, and just giving their feedback! It’s exciting to have this be used and useful out there, and I hope we can keep making it better as we go.