[Announcement] Introducing /stats p

Late-scheduled sponsor power outages between 9am and 10am UTC on Monday, 8 August 2005 (a bit over a day from now) will impact network use for most of our users. We'll take the opportunity at that time to do software updates on several of our servers, and we'll also schedule a test upgrade to Hyperion 1.0. Hyperion is a fork of our current dancer-ircd 1.0 ircd server software.

Hyperion represents the return to active maintenance of our source tree, and provides a number of bug fixes and operational enhancements. There will be a few visible enhancements, such as the use of the

/stats p

command, which will allow the user to get a list of freenode staffers who have marked themselves as "available to handle problems" with a new user mode, +T. We'll make another new umode, +u, available to group members to allow them to bypass channel join limits. And one more major new feature, NOIDPREFIX support, may affect registered nickname formats. Nothing will be implemented for at least two months, but you're urged to read the draft policy and comment to email address policy at freenode dot net.

As a convenience to our users, you can now identify to NickServ as you connect to the network. Just connect with your registered nickname and specify your NickServ password as a server password. We hope this will make identifying to NickServ easier.

Channel staffers will notice that usernames appear in WHOIS as "I=foo" or "N=foo" to indicate whether identd was successful or not. Channel forwarding has been cleaned up and should work properly with most clients. Channel forwarding bans now show the target channel. Various commands no longer break idle time. Channel quiet mask requests (+q) are now always reflected as '+b %foo' mode changes to help keep clients synchronized. Hostname cloaks have been changed; where they previously appeared as right-major hierarchical names using '.' to separate tokens, they will now be left-major, using '/' as token separator. They'll be extremely easy to distinguish from actual DNS hostnames and to ban or exempt as required. And a variety of operational and protocol changes under the covers should help the network to function more smoothly.

The most significant change to our code base, however, is just that we've reactivated the coding project and our development is now done from an SVN repository. Thanks to jilles, GXTi and the others on #hyperion for their excellent work in putting together the release. If you have any problems on Monday, please stop by the channel or email bugs at freenode dot net.

Thank you for your patience during the upgrades, and thank you for using freenode!