Activity Report 2022 - Engineering

Libera Chat’s engineering team is responsible for developing and maintaining the software used to provide the IRC network and any auxiliary services as Libera requires.

Team Organisation

The team ended the year with 14 members, up one from last year. We continue to hold development team meetings subject to there being topics to discuss.

Activity

Engineering activity has been split into two main areas: incremental improvements to our current server platform, and development of our experimental next-generation software.

In the last year we have delivered several improvements to the user experience on the network, including:

• User mode +I, to hide your idle time
• The $g extended ban type, to match users who match a given pattern and are not logged in to services
• Throttling of password-based login attempts, and made login failure notices opt-in to reduce unnecessary noise
• Connection shedding support, to reduce the impact of planned maintenance on the network
• Improved behaviour and error messages in a number of unusual or exceptional situations

Development of Sable, our experimental next-generation server, continues at a variable pace, and we continue to welcome contributions from anyone interested.