History of UnrealIRCd releases

For historic purposes, this page contains the history of all UnrealIRCd releases. If you are instead looking for a short table showing which version is supported, then see UnrealIRCd releases.

If you like reading about UnrealIRCd history then you may also be interested in these forum posts that look back on it:
 * UnrealIRCd celebrates its 15th birthday (18 May 2014)
 * UnrealIRCd 20 years: a look at the past and the future (20 May 2019)

UnrealIRCd 6
UnrealIRCd 6.x is the stable branch since December 2021, it is currently the only supported branch. Most of the initial work happened during mid-2021 by two developers (k4be and Syzop). Main new features were JSON logging support, named extended bans, geoip and more flexibility (configurability) in several areas. In 2023, JSON-RPC, the UnrealIRCd webpanel and the simplified anti flood mode  were added. See also What's new in UnrealIRCd 6.

UnrealIRCd 5
UnrealIRCd 5.x was released on December 2019 and support ended on July 1, 2023. It was worked on for half a year by 3 developers. The main focus of this release was adding channel history, IRCv3 features and cleaning up the source code (including a major overhaul of the module API). See also What's new in UnrealIRCd 5.

NOTE: The UnrealIRCd 5.x series are no longer supported since July 1, 2023

UnrealIRCd 4
UnrealIRCd 4 took 2 years from the first alpha version to the first stable release (4.0.0) at the end of 2015. The main focus of this release was to modernize the source code and featureset. Using the survey results from 250+ users, we improved modularity, oper level granularity and made the IRCd modern and more accessible to newcomers. For a full list of changes, see What's new in UnrealIRCd 4.

The UnrealIRCd 4.x series are no longer supported since January 1, 2021

Release Candidates and dot releases like 1.2.3 .4 are not always listed in the table below.

UnrealIRCd 3.2.x
UnrealIRCd 3.2.x was the most successful UnrealIRCd series to date. It took almost 3 years from the first beta to the first stable release. In fact, the development period was so long that many people started running beta versions on their production network. After the first stable release in 2004 the series were maintained for 12 years. It was UnrealIRCd 3.2.x that made us conquer the market, resulting in a market share of over 50%. Feature-wise 3.2 brought a completely new configuration file, unlike all other IRC Daemons, which made us very flexible. Other notable major features were: modules support, anti-flood features like channel mode +f and spam filtering.

NOTE: The UnrealIRCd 3.2.x series are no longer supported since January 1, 2017