Synapse 0.24 is here!

Hi folks,

Synapse 0.24 is out (currently at 0.24.1)! This is a pretty big release as it includes initial support for Groups, also known as Communities (UI for which is landing currently on Riot/Web and later Riot/Mobile). Groups let you associate together a set of users and rooms, letting you define a community - e.g. +matrix:matrix.org is the community of the core Matrix project itself (whose users are the core Matrix.org team, and whose public rooms are the rooms we officially manage/moderate as Matrix.org).  We'll yell more about Groups once the UI is ready for action in the near future, but the good news is that Synapse should be ready to go (although the API is still fairly experimental and very much evolving).

Other stuff worth calling out in this release includes: massive performance improvements on receiving federation traffic (we now process federation traffic for different rooms in parallel); fixing a major cause of performance issues (caused when processing spurious events for rooms you've actually left); modularising and improving the the spamchecker; @room notification support; backup media repository support; and finally the ability to autojoin new users to a set of rooms on the server!

You can get the latest release from Github as usual; have fun - and thanks for flying Matrix :)

Changes in synapse v0.24.1 (2017-10-24)

Bug fixes:

• Fix updating group profiles over federation (PR #2567)

Changes in synapse v0.24.0 (2017-10-23)

No changes since v0.24.0-rc1

Changes in synapse v0.24.0-rc1 (2017-10-19)

Features:

• Add Group Server (PR #2352, #2363, #2374, #2377, #2378, #2382, #2410, #2426, #2430, #2454, #2471, #2472, #2544)
• Add support for channel notifications (PR #2501)
• Add basic implementation of backup media store (PR #2538)
• Add config option to auto-join new users to rooms (PR #2545)

• Make the spam checker a module (PR #2474)
• Delete expired url cache data (PR #2478)
• Ignore incoming events for rooms that we have left (PR #2490)
• Allow spam checker to reject invites too (PR #2492)
• Add room creation checks to spam checker (PR #2495)
• Spam checking: add the invitee to user_may_invite (PR #2502)
• Process events from federation for different rooms in parallel (PR #2520)
• Allow error strings from spam checker (PR #2531)
• Improve error handling for missing files in config (PR #2551)

• Fix handling SERVFAILs when doing AAAA lookups for federation (PR #2477)
• Fix incompatibility with newer versions of ujson (PR #2483) Thanks to @jeremycline!
• Fix notification keywords that start/end with non-word chars (PR #2500)
• Fix stack overflow and logcontexts from linearizer (PR #2532)
• Fix 500 error when fields missing from power_levels event (PR #2552)
• Fix 500 error when we get an error handling a PDU (PR #2553)