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Welcome to OFTC!
The Open and Free Technology Community aims to provide stable and effective
collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world,
while closely listening to their needs and desires.
OFTC was founded at the end of 2001 by a group of experienced members of the
Open Source and Free Software communities aiming to provide these communities
with better communication, development, and support infrastructure.
OFTC is a member project of Software in the Public
Interest, a non-profit organization which was founded
to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.
You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC
Client of choice, or by the
WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the
network and chat directly from within your browser.
Connection Details:
ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697 for SSL (alternative port: 9999), IPv4 and IPv6.
irc://irc.oftc.net:6667 for non-SSL (alternative ports: 6668-6670, 7000), IPv4 and IPv6.
SSL is supported on all of our servers. The server certificates are signed
by the Let’s Encrypt certification authority.
We also publish DNSSEC-signed TLSA records for irc.oftc.net:6697/tcp
(see dig _6697._tcp.irc.oftc.net tlsa).
See CertFP for how to configure client certificate-based NickServ identification.
If you need to force IPv4, connect to ircs://irc4.oftc.net:6697.
We offer a WebChat service (also via the boxes at the top of this page).
Use of Tor is permitted to irc.oftc.net or our onion service on
ircs://oftcnet6xg6roj6d7id4y4cu6dchysacqj2ldgea73qzdagufflqxrid.onion.
We offer IRC services (NickServ, ChanServ) for nick and channel registration.
If you have support requests regarding the operation of the network please stop
by #oftc or email [email protected]. We welcome issues and pull requests on
our GitHub projects, especially on the
issue tracking repository.
News
January 2022
We now offer a Tor hidden service:
ircs://oftcnet6xg6roj6d7id4y4cu6dchysacqj2ldgea73qzdagufflqxrid.onion.
November 2021
2021 staff election results - thanks to
Steve McIntyre (Sledge) and Alexander Færøy (ahf) for running the
elections as counters this year.
October 2021
We’ve reconfigured our
Let’s Encrypt TLS certificates to not use the expired DST Root CA X3,
which should resolve issues with some clients and older TLS
implementations. Note that if you’re using Android older than 7.1.1, you
will no longer be able to connect without manually trusting the Let’s
Encrypt CA.
September 2021
We have now deployed the new verification flow
that utilizes hCaptcha instead of Google ReCaptcha. Upon registration, the user receives
a link which they can visit in their browser and solve a captcha. Upon successful completion,
they will be marked as verified.
Together with this, we have also made the system automatically mark the user as verified on the
IRC side, making the old checkverify NickServ command no longer necessary.
Should the user need a new link, as they expire after one hour, the new reverify NickServ command
can come in handy.
The primary purpose of the old ServicesWeb web application was to facilitate verification.
With today’s changes, we have decided to discontinue it.
June 2021
New Anti-Spam Bot - We have deployed a new anti-spam bot.
With your channel op’s permission, it joins your channel, blocks spam
messages before the channel sees them, and K-lines the spamming host. Read
this page to see if our bot is a good fit for your channel.
May 2021
Privacy Policy updates - New accounts now have
the flag PRIVATE turned on by default, all old accounts have
this flag turned on forcefully ONCE as of now. This means that
the mail address used for registration is no longer visible by
default to other users, only IRCOps.
We have also updated our privacy policy to include more details on
which data is visible to who (including other users).
October 2020
2020 staff election results - thanks to
Steve McIntyre (Sledge), Matt Trout (mst), and Alexander Færøy (ahf)
for running the elections as counters this year.
November 2019
2019 staff election results - thanks to
Dan Christensen (opello) and Steve McIntyre (Sledge)
for once again running the elections as counters this year.
OFTC chair is now Tom Wesley (tomaw).
March 2019
We have updated our Privacy Policy to mention that
we scan connecting hosts for known vulnerabilities and open proxies, and
that we use the EFnet RBL. This was erroneously omitted previously.
November 2018
2018 staff election results - thanks to
Alexander Færøy (ahf), Dan Christensen (opello), and Steve McIntyre
(Sledge) for once again running the elections as counters this year.
June 2018
Late yesterday evening (Thursday 28 June 2018) OFTC staff became aware of successful unauthorized access to a number
of OFTC user accounts. All evidence points to the unauthorized access being the result of a combination of weak
account passwords and an attacker potentially using credential dumps from other online services.
The impact appears to have been limited to channels under the control of the compromised user accounts. OFTC and its
services have not been compromised.
Known affected users have had their passwords reset and we will be working with those users to help them regain
access. As soon as our review is complete, services will return to normal. If your account was not impacted, please
ensure that you are using a strong, unique password for your OFTC account.
We welcome new staff member Unit193 on board!
May 2018
OFTC has a Privacy Policy now. Please review it for
anything that you might not like. Feedback is welcome on #oftc and via
[email protected].
April 2018
We welcome new staff member pastly on board!
On May 7th, irc6.oftc.net will no longer include A records. If you
are using this DNS name to connect to OFTC from an IPv4-only host,
you will want to update your client to use irc.oftc.net.
November 2017
tjfontaine is stepping down from NOC and is now an OFTC advisor.
rnowak is taking over the role as OFTC ombudsman.
2017 staff election results - thanks to
Alexander Færøy (ahf), Dan Christensen (opello), and Steve McIntyre
(Sledge) for running the elections as counters this year.
July 2017
A new user mode (+j) has been added which prevents private messages unless the sender is registered with services or whitelisted by the receiver. If a user has +Gj set, they can only receive messages from registered users who also share a channel. The functionality of +G has not been changed.
June 2017
AS6453 is sponsoring a server in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. Thanks!
May 2017
We welcome new staff member mcintosh on board!
March 2017
As of 2017-03-26, NickServ will require nick verification via
services.oftc.net for the +R user mode.
This affects channels using the +M and +R channel modes.
In other words, make sure to verify your newly registered nickname using the web interface.
January 2017
On January 8th, the EFnet RBL domain had expired, and the domain was
subsequently taken over by a domain spam^Wparker. They went on to return
A responses for all blacklist queries, which made our IRC services cloak
all incoming connections as coming in over Tor. While investigating the
cause of the problem, services were restarted, which suddenly made (almost)
all existing connections to be cloaked as Tor connections as well, and as
an unfortunate side effect, also akilled a 3-digit number of connections.
We have disabled the use of EFnet RBL for now, and will work on putting
sanity checks in place in services which should reject the non-RBL
responses so this incident should not repeat itself. Sorry for the trouble.
There are still users connected who are wrongly cloaked as being on Tor.
Symptoms are being unable to join (or talk in) channels that have banned
Tor users. To fix, reconnect, or “/msg nickserv set cloak on/off” to toggle
the personalized cloaks which will override the Tor cloaks.
December 2016
OFTC is using DroneBL (and EFnet RBL) to
automatically block incoming IRC connections from hosts known to be
compromised. Starting last week, DroneBL is now enforced in the firewalls.
Previously affected connections were rejected on the IRC level with a “This
host is infected” akill message; these connections will now receive a TCP
RST.
If you have trouble connecting, check DroneBL’s
IP lookup form.
Once the DroneBL listing is removed, you should be able to connect again.
If you keep receiving an akill message, contact
[email protected] to get that removed as well.
November 2016
OFTC’s ircservices have a web interface at
services.oftc.net.
New NickServ accounts now require verification through the services
web interface to use the generic user cloaks.
October 2016
2016 staff election results
September 2016
We have completed the upgrade to oftc-hybrid 1.7.
OFTC now supports modern DHE and ECDHE cipher suites to offer
perfect forward secrecy
for SSL/TLS connections. Thanks to Alexander Færøy for the patches!
NickServ’s AJOIN feature is now fully available again.
We welcome new staff member dwfreed on board!
The minimum length of acceptable nicknames for registration in NickServ has
been lowered to 2 characters. Previously the minimum length was 3
characters.
In self-referential news, news items are now also available as
Atom/RSS feed .
July 2016
OFTC is now featuring full DNSSEC support. Both the oftc.net and
geo.oftc.net zones are signed and verifiable from the DNS root. Additionally,
TLSA (aka DANE)
records allow verification of the individual SSL certificate fingerprints
of our IRC servers.
On related news, our old oftcdns load-balancing for IRC servers based on
Python Twisted has been replaced by a
newer implemetation based on bind9
and dynamic DNS updates.
Adding new AJOIN channels via NickServ is currently disabled.
The current implementation allows to circumvent channel bans.
AJOIN will be reenabled once this is fixed.
April 2016
We have completed the move to SSL certificates issued by the
Let’s Encrypt project. These certificates
should remove the need for users to manually install any CA certificate
files. Please drop by on #oftc or mail [email protected] if you have any
troubles with the new certificates.
OFTC would like to thank
Software in the Public Interest
for providing us with certificate services over the last years, when
non-commercial SSL certificates were a scarce resource.
Update 2016-04-19: Users who have hard-coded paths to CA files in their
client config will need to update or remove that config. Especially irssi
users are hit by this problem. Removing ssl_cafile from ~/.irssi/config
(but leaving ssl_verify in place) should fix it. (Note that /reconnect does
not use the new config, use /reload /disconnect /connect instead.)
March 2016