2023 had been a slow year, so we skipped on our traditional annual update, but it is back this year. here’s a summary of everything that’s been happening since Nov 2022. Most of the progress these last two years have been around making chathistory more suitable for the real world, and reducing bandwidth usage for mobile clients.

Specs ratified 🔗

Sadly, none during this time span. We’ll try to do better next year.

New drafts 🔗

• Aug 2023 pre-away - Allows clients to update - or not update - their AWAY status early in the connection, when connecting to a bouncer or server that supports multiple connections per user #514
• Oct 2023 no-implicit-names - Allows clients to opt out from receiving the user list when joining a channel. This is useful for clients with limited bandwith, to defer loading the user list to the time it is needed, or the connection is less busy; or to avoid redundancy with WHOX #527
• Apr 2024 message-redaction- Allows removing messages from the chat history, or to ask other clients to hide a message #524, #538
• Jul 2024 account-extban - Standardizes support most servers already had for banning accounts (rather than hostmasks), through a new ISUPPORT token #464
• Sep 2024 metadata-2 - Latest incarnation of a specification meant to support arbitrary public information on users. The previous version of this specification was deprecated in 2016 due to performance issues #501

Specs updated 🔗

• Feb 2023 Standard Replies - Added standard-replies capability, indicating clients support arbitrary FAIL/WARN/NOTE messages, even when not explicitly allowed by another capability #506
• Feb 2023 chathistory - Added MSGREFTYPES ISUPPORT token for servers to signal whether they support/prefer message ids or timestamps to refer to points in the history. This was done because in practice, most server implementations have a strong preference for one or the other. #510
• Sep 2023 Capability negotiation - Clarified that servers may add trailing spaces at the end of capability lists #530
• Sep 2023 away-notify - Clarified that clients should not be sent notifications for their own changes in AWAY status #531

On the Roadmap 🔗

Highlights from our ongoing roadmap milestone

• ratify CHATHISTORY #437
• ratify websocket #548, after resolving the issue of encoding #551
• Message editing and deletion #425

Other 🔗

We now have an account on the Fediverse, follow us at @ircv3@mastodon.social.

We updated the specifications page to replace RFC1459, RFC2812 and RFC7194 with “Modern IRC” as the base specification IRCv3 builds upon. The latter has matured enough in recent years that we are confident it is a strict improvement over the RFCs in terms of accuracy and completeness. #469

Finally, we recommend you check out Sable, an interesting new IRCd developed by Libera.Chat, with built-in services and gossiping instead of a spanning-tree.