| ircd |
Faerion IRC Server is a heavily modified clone of DalNet DreamForge.
The main features of this fork are, currently:
Support for transparent, user-controlled charset translation (virtually) from anything to anything. This is done by using Unicode mappings, which can be installed or removed on the fly, without having to interrupt the server. The server supports a special "fallback" conversion table which maps all characters that are not supported by a user's preferred charset to the closest looking characters. This process is typically referred to as "transliteration" and is widely used on Russian IRC networks to avoid problems with incompatible charsets. The difference is that with Faerion, the server takes all necessary investigation to see what should be transliterated, and what can be passed without changes.
Clients that have native support for Unicode (UTF-8), will benefit from using it at full scale without the implication of "cryptic writings" (which raw UTF-8 is for a typical human eye).
Support for "persistent channels": channels registered with the Channel Service (mode +r) are not deleted when the last user leaves. This slightly saves bandwidth and helps mitigate several privacy issues (such as channel key revelation).
Support for channel forwarding based on user address matching rules: with channel mode +f enabled, all ban masks can have a ",#channel" suffix appended to them to forward clients to another channel instead of declining the attempt to join the channel.
Limited portability. The server is currently available for most POSIX platforms (modern BSD and Linux variants) and Microsoft Windows.
The server retains the initial protocol compatibility, so it allows using various extension software without problems.
The server is available under the terms of GNU GPL.
The server can be downloaded from here. Change logs for the following versions are available: 1.17.7, 1.17.7.1, 1.18.
The developement of the server has been halted; only bugfix releases are now expected to happen. We are currently working on an environment for building the next iteration of faerion-ircd (this is not going to be a "yet anothet new protocol", just a software redesign).
However, features that help achieveng better user experience and which are relatively easy to integrate, can be discussed. Feel free to report them, here.