Hello all, and happy new year!

The very first commit to the ngIRCd source code repository was made on December 11 2001, back then in CVS. And today, roughly years later, I just released ngIRCd 26.1, the free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server for small or private networks.

Version 26.1 is a bug fix release only, without new features. If you aren't affected by any of the fixed issues, there is no need for a timely upgrade if you are already running ngIRCd 26.

The ChangeLog file lists the following changes (and can be seen online here: https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/blob/rel-26.1/ChangeLog):

- Fix a "format string" compiler warning (detected on OpenBSD). - No longer set "AI_ADDRCONFIG" when resolving host names, even when it exists: with this option set, on an IPv6-only host, we prevent 127.0.0.1 to get translated properly, even when the loopback interface has this address configured! And as the test suite uses 127.0.0.1, it was broken on IPv6-only hosts. The drawback is that the resolver possibly returns more addresses now, even of an unsupported/not connected address family; but this shouldn't do much harm in practice, as ngIRCd iterates over all returned addresses while trying to establish an outgoing connection. Closes #281. - Revert "Show allowed channel types in ISUPPORT(005) numeric only", which was introduced in 26~rc1: This lead to some IRC clients assuming "oh, no channel prefix characters at all, so no channels at all, so no PRIVMSG can go to any channel" when "AllowedChannelTypes" was set to the empty string ("") -- which is not the case when there are pre-defined channel set up or other servers still having channels! So "allowed channel types" != "supported channel types", and we always have to list all supported ones in the ISUPPORT(005) numeric! Closes #285. - Test suite: Wait 2 seconds after reloading the daemon, which is required because on reload, all listening ports are closed, configuration updated, and then opened again. This lead to subsequent tests running while the daemon isn't listening on any ports, and that's why some tests could fail. Closes #280. - platformtest.sh: Try to mangle CLang name more intelligently. - Documentation: Fixed URLs of Atheme IRC services, updated all mentions from CVS to Git, and updated Platforms.txt -- Oh, and it is 2021 now! ;-)

You can download ngIRCd 26.1 from the download section on our homepage at https://ngircd.barton.de (mirror: https://ngircd.sourceforge.io). The primary download locations are:

• https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/releases • https://ngircd.barton.de/pub/ngircd/ • https://ngircd.sourceforge.io/pub/ngircd/

Thanks a lot to all contributors & testers!

Stay safe and have fun! Alex