New And Upcoming Features

by el, glguy, moonmoon, She, spb

Hello Libera.Chat users,

As we look towards the end of the year, we thought we’d put together an update on what we have been up to behind the scenes.

New Features

User mode I: Disable idle time display

This was an upcoming feature on our previous New And Upcoming Features blog post, and it’s finally here!

Your idle time is the number of seconds since the last time you sent a message. It is shown by /whois and /who %l queries that are sent to the server you are on. This can be useful for people to determine if you are available, but can also be a privacy concern.

User mode I hides your idle time, displaying a time of 0 seconds wherever it would otherwise be displayed. Additionally, responses to /whois queries about you will explicitly indicate that you are hiding your idle time. To keep things fair, however, setting user mode I will also prevent you from seeing others’ idle times, regardless of whether they have I set or not. Note that staff will always be able to see users’ idle times.

New commands for Group Contacts

We have added a bunch of nice things to the ProjectServ service that we use to manage and document project and community registrations. These new features are aimed at enabling peace of mind by providing information that allows groups to audit their registered namespaces without needing to wait for staff assistance:

  1. ChanServ LISTGROUPCHANS lets Group Contacts list all registered channels in their namespaces.

  2. NickServ LISTGROUPCLOAKS lets Group Contacts list all users with cloaks belonging to their projects.

  3. Group contacts now receive a notification whenever a new channel is registered in one of their channel namespaces. The notifications look like this:

     -ProjectServ- The user veryrealbob (account name fakebob) has registered the channel #bobsproject-hates-kittens which is within the namespace (#bobsproject) of a project that you are a group contact for (bobsproject)

  4. When Group Contacts of a namespace do ChanServ INFO for a channel registered in their namespace, they will now see a full list of both public and unlisted/private Group Contacts assigned to their project. Others will still only see public contacts when they use ChanServ INFO

Extban improvements

The existing $x extban has been improved. This extban allows the GECOS string (also known as realname) to be matched in addition to the standard nick, user, and host fields. The improvement is that the host component of these masks will now also match against IP addresses if that address is publicly visible. While matching both hosts and IP addresses was standard behaviour for normal masks, it was previously not implemented for $x bans. GECOS matches are generally most useful when matching bridged users where the GECOS value is fixed by the bridge.

Help text: $x:<mask> - Bans all users with matching nick!user@host#gecos

Example: $x:*!*@192.0.2.0/24#suspicious-gecos-here

The new $g extban extends $x by only matching unidentified users. This could be useful if unidentified bots or other undesirable connections were coming from a specific service and a channel did not want to restrict chat from all unidentified users. When a # character is present in the mask, this ban works like $x to match GECOS as well.

Help text: $g:<mask> - Matches as a normal ban but excludes identified users

Example: $g:*!*@undesirable.host.name

For documentation on all the extbans, please visit our channel mode documentation.

Upcoming features

Easier account creation and verification

This was announced late last year, and an initial iteration of this feature is finally complete. We are currently working on an automated build and deployment pipeline for it, which we should also be able to use for our other projects written in Rust.

Sable update

We’ve continued to work in the background on Sable, our experimental next-generation server platform. It is currently possible to create a network of Sable servers, connect to it, and use it for basic chat. While there’s a long way to go yet, Sable will allow us to offer a greatly improved user experience, including persistent presence and history without the need for bouncers and much better resilience to network interruptions. If you’d like to get involved in this effort, or just observe how we’re progressing, come and join us in #libera-dev.

Documentation updates

We were asked in the #libera-communities channel if we could provide a quick reference to help operators know when and how to set various types of access control measures for their channels. This has been asked and attempted several times in the past, but this time we did manage to pull a simple guide together! You can now find a Quick Ops Guide in the guides area of this site.

In the future we hope to supplement this guide another more comprehensive reference text that summarises some of the more advanced features and practices available. If there are any other guides you would like to see, let us know.

We have also updated our channel registration guide which explains channel namespaces, what is considered on-topic, and the formal group registration process. The previous guide was quite confusing in many respects, leading people to be unsure where their channels belong or whether or not they were allowed to register channels with ChanServ without also going through a formal group registration process for their projects. We hope that the new guide clears up all of this confusion and becomes a more useful point of reference.

Libera merch

As a reminder, we have a lineup of Libera.Chat merch at FreeWear.org including shirts, mugs, and stickers. We get a small cut of every purchase made on the platform, so it is a good way to show your support in addition to repping the network in real life.

If that’s not quite your thing but you’d like to show your support in other ways, you can give us a donation or contribute to the many open source projects that Libera.Chat relies on.