Fear not, we are back! Hurrah! That's right, we are live, on air, again. And we have quite some fascinating and interesting news. Yes, we haven't posted anything for a while, which is sad, but today we celebrate a very important milestone in the life of MindForge: it's been 10 years! 120 months. 3652.42 days. 87658 hours and 6 minutes.

During these 87658 hours and 6 minutes, the Internet has seen MindForge come to life and grow. We've had servers come and servers go, we've had good and bad users, staff members joining and quitting, new features, not-so-new features, games, arguments between users and/or IRCOps, and -to put it delicately- a "fair" share of the infamous DDoS attacks that haunt the internet these days.

And yet, here we are. Petabytes, or perhaps even exabytes of traffic have flowed from every corner in the world, hopping from router to router, sometimes going back and forth to space, with the ultimate goal of providing you with the greatest chatting experience in a friendly and kind community.

We all have our own lifes outside of IRC, and even though most of us wouldn't know if we bumped into each other in the street, at the end of the day, we all have a common place to come together and have a nice, relaxing chat. It's definitely been a long ride, but just like real life, people managed to make good friends. Friendships that last over the years. Friendships across the world, be it with the neighbor next door, or a million miles away. Friendships that know no race, religion, country borders. Ultimately, friendships based on the principle of freedom. We, at MindForge, are proud to be part of this global movement and provide our users with the best chatting experience. We might not have tens of thousands of users, but those who stay are truly part of this network's blood.

To celebrate this important landmark in our history, we have prepared something. We are upgrading our services to Anope 2.0.1, along with some in-house custom tweaks. Below, you will find a list of the new commands in our services' pseudoclients.

Please read the commands highlighted on red carefully.

Significant changes, among others, include e-mail confirmation to validate nick registration, and also the non-existence of channel passwords (owners can add other owners by using access level 10000).

Do not hesitate to contact us on #MindForge-Chat if you have any questions, or if you just feel like passing by. We're always open to suggestions for improvement!

Oh... and of course: HAVE FUN!

NickServ

• AJOIN: This command manages your auto join list. When you identify you will automatically join the channels on your auto join list.
• CONFIRM: This command is used by several commands as a way to confirm changes made to your account such as REGISTER or RESETPASS.
• RECOVER: Recovers your nick from another user or from services just like GHOST and RELEASE does it.
• REGISTER: Registers your nickname in the NickServ database and creates a new group for your nickname. You need to confirm your account to complete the process registration, so you must enter a valid e-mail address to receive the confirmation code. Important: The account will expire in 24 hours if you don't confirm it.
• RESEND: This command will resend you the registration confirmation e-mail.
• RESETPASS: Sends a code to the nickname's e-mail address with instructions of how to reset the password.
• SET KEEPMODES: Enables or disables KEEPMODES for your nickname. If KEEPMODES is enabled, services will remember your usermodes and attempt to re-set them the next time you authenticate.
• SET LANGUAGE: Changes the language services uses when sending messages to you. Important: The syntax of this command changed, you don't have to use numbers to choose the language anymore. Please, check the list of languages available.
• SET MESSAGE: Allows you to choose the way services are communicating with you. This command replaces SET MSG.
• UNGROUP: This command ungroups an specified nickname from the group it is in. The ungrouped nikname will keep its registration time, password, e-mail, greet message, language and URL.

MemoServ

• IGNORE: Allows you to ignore users by nickname or hostname from memoing you or a channel. If someone on the memo ignore list tries to memo you or a channel, they will not be told that you have them ignored.

ChanServ

• ACCESS: Maintains the access list for a channel. You can mix LEVELS, FLAGS and XOP options (QOP, SOP, AOP, HOP and VOP) on the same channel, so this command replaces SET XOP.
• AUTOLIMIT: Manages automatically the channel user limit.
• BAN: Bans a given nick or mask on a channel. An optional expiry may be given to cause services to remove the ban after a set amount of time, so this command replaces TBAN.
• CLONE: This command copy all settings from one channel to another.
• DOWN: Removes a selected nickname status on a channel.
• ENFORCE: Enforces various channel modes and set options. The modes and options you can enforce are SECUREOPS, RESTRICTED, REGONLY, SSLONLY, BANS and LIMIT.
• ENTRYMSG: Manages the channel's entry messages. This command replaces SET ENTRYMSG.
• FLAGS: Modifies the list of privileged users. It's just another way to modify the channel access list, similar to the XOP (QOP, SOP, AOP, HOP and VOP) and ACCESS methods.
• GETKEY: Returns the key (+k) of the given channel.
• LOG: This commands allows users to configure logging settings for their channel.
• MODE: Controls modes and mode locks on a channel. This command includes the LOCK function, so it replaces SET MLOCK.
• REGISTER: Registers a channel. Warning: The syntax for this command has been updated. In particular, channels do not have passwords anymore. Users are encouraged to use the REGISTER_NEW command to get used to the new syntax, which doesn't include a password. These rules will soon be incorporated in this command and the old syntax will no longer be supported.
• REGISTER_NEW: Registers a channel. Warning: Services has been updated and this command syntax is now different. Channel don't have passwords anymore, so there isn't password argument. If you want to give founder permissions to any user add the nickname with level 10000 to the access channel list. Please, read the command syntax and description carefully before registering a channel.
• SET DESCRIPTION: Sets the description for the channel just like SET DESC does it.
• SET KEEPMODES: Enables or disables KEEPMODES for the given channel. If KEEPMODES is enabled, services will remember modes set on the channel and attempt to re-set them the next time the channel is created.
• SET PERSIST: Enables or disables the persistent channel setting. When persistent is set, the service bot will remain in the channel when it has emptied of users.
• SYNC: Syncs all modes set on users on the channel with the modes.
• TOPIC: Manipulates the topic of the specified channel. This command includes APPEND, LOCK and UNLOCK options, so it replaces APPENDTOPIC and SET TOPICLOCK.
• UP: Updates a selected nicks status on a channel.

BotServ

• SET BANEXPIRE: Sets the time bot bans expire in. If enabled, any bans placed by bots, such as flood kicker, badwords kicker, etc. will automatically be removed after the given time.