Deprecation of NickServ ACCESS and Miscellaneous Options

Hello all. I wanted to discuss some upcoming features that will be deprecated and removed. I will write more beyond the jump break, but here is a quick rundown:

1. The NickServ ACCESS feature is being removed. This feature allowed the whitelisting of hostmasks in NickServ so that it would not require authentication.
2. Various NickServ and ChanServ miscellaneous configuration options are being removed. This allowed setting custom fields such as social media accounts. Going forward, the only supported field will be 'URL', already sent to users when they join channels.

Those who are in sync with IRC development may be keeping an eye on Anope 2.1. Anope 2.1 is the next development release following the 2.0 stable version. Development releases are a great time to introduce breaking changes. These breaking changes can include deprecating features no longer considered necessary in the modern IRC landscape.

NickServ ACCESS is one such feature. As mentioned above, it allowed setting hostmasks (ident@host) that were exempt from requiring authentication. This would stop NickServ from forcibly changing nicknames that have not been authenticated. Keep in mind that these nicknames were still not considered authenticated. While a convenience factor, this feature is no longer necessary. Aside from security concerns, modern authentication options are available to make logging in as simple as possible. SASL can now be used when already connected, and it can also be used to switch accounts without needing to reconnect. NickServ is still available. In the next Anope stable release, NickServ ACCESS will no longer be available as it has been removed. Therefore, it is best to deprecate this feature before upgrading in the future.

This also presents a good time to clean up the various miscellaneous options present in NickServ and ChanServ. Miscellaneous options are those that get displayed when running the INFO command but otherwise provide no benefit. Perhaps vanity options are a more fitting name. Historically, use of these options has been very minimal and the options themselves have become obsolete over the years, such as the ability to set social media usernames for platforms that have since become defunct. 'URL' is the only field that sees the most usage, and in the case of ChanServ, it is already sent to users when joining channels.

On 2024-03-15, I will disable setting these features entirely, and I will remove any stale data tied to these features during the next monthly maintenance cycle. If you wish to unset values yourself, you can run the following commands:

1. /ns access list to list existing entries, and then /ns access del <entry> per entry to remove it.
2. /ns info to list your nickname info, and then /ns set <item> to unset. Example: /ns set discord to unset an existing Discord entry.

Currently available miscellaneous options in NickServ:

• Discord
• Facebook
• GitHub
• Google+
• Instagram
• PCPartPicker
• PlayStation
• Reddit
• Skype
• Steam
• Twitter
• Voat
• Website
• Xbox
• YouTube

Existing NickServ 'Website' entries will be converted to 'URL' during the next maintenance.

Existing ChanServ SET options have been removed. Existing 'Website' entries will be converted to 'URL' during the next maintenance.