Introducing the long-awaited, much-anticipated, rumored and reputed release of the times!

1.0.0 is officially released in stable form!

This New Year's special release brings a guaranteed stable API to LibertyBans, providing a solid basis for a healthy and long-lasting period of growth for the plugin and its community.

New features and improvements:

• Multi-proxy synchronization (#44 and #100). LibertyBans now operates fully-featured on multi-proxy setups; it is possible to ban, mute, warn, and kick players on other backend servers, as well as undo punishments. See the wiki for more information.
• Better documentation. All documentation is located at https://libertybans.org. The database schema is now better documented (#78).
• PostgreSQL support (#48). At least PostgreSQL 12 is required. Included is experimental support for CockroachDB, a database which is quite alike to PostgreSQL and tries to emulate it.
• Composite victims (#73). This powerful feature, while somewhat advanced in nature, is applicable to several use cases. See the wiki for more information.
• Added a %PREVIOUSPAGE% variable (#87).
• Added new variables to punishment messages: %TYPE_VERB%, %TIME_PASSED_SIMPLE%, %TIME_REMAINING_SIMPLE%, %HAS_EXPIRED% (#109).
• Permissions have been redone to follow a direct pattern (#25).
• Tab completion now ignores case (#111).

Improvements to usability, to make LibertyBans a more popular plugin (in the traditional sense of the word popular):

• In release builds, HikariCP is relocated in LibertyBans (0f22160). So, the presence of unrelocated HikariCP copies in other plugins -- bugs, which must be remedied -- will not prevent the operation of LibertyBans.
  • It is still imperative to fix bugs in your server as a responsible and competent administrator. LibertyBans will continue to warn the user when unrelocated dependencies are detected.
  • On Velocity, the plugin which failed to relocate is now identified (#92).
• An informative error message is printed when users do not have the proper SQL permissions (5cc7b40). This mitigates a pterodactyl bug which causes pterodactyl to grant insufficient SQL permissions.

For existing users, a robust and easy (hopefully easy) migration path from 0.8.x is provided:

• Migration Guide
• The migration guide currently does not cover having a LibertyBans 0.8.x instance co-exist with 1.0.0 on the same database.
  • A compatibility mode will be created in LibertyBans 0.8.2, an upcoming release, providing the ability to have LibertyBans 0.8.2 co-exist on the same database with 1.0.x.
  • Until 0.8.2 is released with this compatibility mode, it will not be possible to operate a LibertyBans 0.8.x instance on the same database as 1.0.x, and it should not be tried, either.

A reminder and some comments on the long-term support policy:

• At a bare minimum, LibertyBans major releases are supported for at least 4 months after a new major release. This means LibertyBans 0.8.x will be supported until at least May 2022, which is a long time from now.
• Since LibertyBans 0.8.2 (an upcoming 0.8.x version which will provide a compatibility mode with 1.0.0) has not yet been released, I will start the long-term support schedule once this version is released. This is because I consider the long-term support period to be for the purpose of migration, and migration is most feasible when all compatibility options have been released.
• In practice, I may decide to extend support for LibertyBans 0.8.x past the minimum of 4 months. I will do this if I learn of users who need to remain on 0.8.x for one reason or another, or who otherwise require a significant effort to upgrade to 1.0.0 on account of breaking changes.