Atheme - big strategy changes, and an open invitation

nenolod · Idler Joined: 23 Jan 2004 Posts: 334 Location: A box!

strategy change

As some of you know, there were organisational issues in Atheme Services development after Atheme Services 2.1. This was due to multiple reasons, including some people not wanting as much community involvement than others, and other people wanting to take the core in a unilateral direction. Although Atheme Services 2.2 did not see any of these things happen, development had pretty much stagnated to just jilles (and occasionally me) maintaining everything.

Luckily, this is done with. Both forks (ermyth and bserv) have remerged into Atheme Services.

To solve the issues surrounding the original forks, we are going to make some very distinct changes involving Atheme Services 3.x development, which are:

The project will be split into two components: atheme-core, and atheme-community.
atheme-core: Core IRC interaction services, and core implementation of the base services, e.g. NickServ, ChanServ, OperServ, MemoServ.
atheme-community-modules: A module distribution which is released alongside the Atheme Services core which adds additional features and services considered inappropriate for the base services system. This is a distribution to which anyone can contribute anything they wish (as long as it's not something like a spy on your users module, anyway).
Together, atheme-core and atheme-community will provide a completely customisable solution for all IRC networks.

If you're interested in helping, we encourage you to get involved in the process. Atheme Services 3 development will be a very community oriented process, and we encourage you to come on IRC (irc.staticbox.net #atheme) and discuss the direction of the services project. There's plenty of ways you can help, for details you should see our Trac.

The first release of this new development cycle will be on October 16, so we hope to see you become involved, and for Atheme Services to become your favourite in IRC services.

This is also an open invitation for anyone and everyone to become involved with Atheme, and to develop and modify it. We're interested in your modules, patches, and ideas (provided that they have more reasoning than "just because other services do it this way").

New Website

A new website based on MediaWiki is now online, to which anyone is able to contribute useful documentation. We encourage you to do so if you have tips and pointers on how to use Atheme Services.

New features in Atheme 3 and Atheme Community Modules:

This is a list of things planned for both the Atheme core and Atheme Community Modules.

(core): Multiple founders for channels [already done in Mercurial]
(core): Password migration
(community): (nick|chan)serv/archaetypes, search for semantic data in the services database
(community): chanserv/succession_democratic, an alternative approach to channel succession instead of the default linear (by amount of privileges) succession
(community): chanserv/levels, IRCservices like access levels for channels
(core): Flags for both setting +q and +a on ircds which support them, OWNER/DEOWNER/PROTECT/DEPROTECT commands [partially done in Mercurial]
(community): BotServ
much much more.

Anyway, hope you'll join in!

- nenolod