Placing the Statistics Website on Hiatus

Hello everyone, just a quick announcement regarding the existing statistics website. In short, the current dashboard will be discontinued, at least for now. The aim is to not have it permanently retired, but that depends on what the future holds.

The current panel is powered by an open-source program called MagIRC, which is the de facto statistics dashboard used by networks running Denora (previously) and Anope 2.0 (now). However, the software has been unmaintained for quite some time, with the last change being made by its author 4 years ago.

This poses a few issues, namely compatibility and security. MagIRC has been reported to not be compatible with recent versions of PHP. From a security perspective, an unmaintained program exposed to the internet is a definite risk.

However, there is another reason for making this move: Anope 2.1 (which will become 2.2 upon exiting its development cycle) no longer contains the underlying module that MagIRC relies upon to produce statistics. There is a replacement interface, but MagIRC would need to be refactored to work with it. Due to the unmaintained status of MagIRC, it seems unlikely.

To avoid having to deliver the bad news when the network is eventually upgraded, I thought it best to deliver it now. Looking at server logs, it also had minimal usage, at least from actual humans.

As soon as a suitable replacement system becomes available, I will look to reinstate the website. In the meantime, it will be on indefinite hiatus.