Insecure Connections Have Been Retired

Greetings everyone! I wanted to make a quick announcement in follow-up to my previous post discussing the state of insecure connections on the network.

After:

• a feedback period of 3 months and receiving no feedback, and
• an analysis of all existing connections to the network revealing that none are insecure,

I have made the decision to turn off insecure connections on port 6667 entirely. New connections to the port will simply result in a connection refused error.

It is now the year 2022, and TLS connectivity has become commonplace and cheap to implement. All modern IRC clients and bot frameworks support secure connections, and those that do not can still fall back on tunneling their connections through another program, such as the popular ZNC bouncer.