Synapse 1.62 released

Hey all, Synapse 1.62 is out! Let's have a look inside.

Spam checker improvements

In the past few weeks, the Synapse team has been working with the Matrix.org Trust & Safety team to help module developers build more efficient protections against spam. As a consequence of this work, Synapse 1.62 introduces new ways for modules to communicate the result of actions taken against a specific message or operation through the spam checker module callbacks.

Previously, most spam checker callbacks would be expected to return a boolean indicating whether a specific operation should be qualified as spam. Starting from Synapse 1.62, modules are now expected to return either synapse.module_api.NOT_SPAM (to indicate an action is not spammy), or an error code that is part of synapse.module_api.errors.Codes.

Note that the previous behaviour is still supported but is now deprecated, and will be removed in a future version of Synapse.

See the upgrade notes for a list of the affected callbacks and an example of this change. Note that on top of the list described there, the check_event_for_spam callback was also updated with a similar change in Synapse 1.61.

Everything else

This release of Synapse includes important performance improvements around syncing, specifically around handling device lists and notifications.

Synapse 1.62 also introduce a changes of its optional dependency on the LDAP3 authentication provider module to v0.2.1 in order to fix an issue with usernames that include uppercase characters.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Beeper, Sami Olmari, Daniel Aloni, Thumbscrew and Hannes Lerchl.