Since Fri 18th April 2003, the DansGuardian 2.7.x unstable branch has been in
development and testing for 15 months. It is now known as DansGuardian 2.8.0
and is considered stable and ready for production servers.  This represents a
milestone in the DansGuardian world.

For the improved performance alone, it is recommended that users still using
2.6.x upgrade to 2.8.

DansGuardian 2.8 has many massive improvements over version 2.6, the last
stable release.  Just *some* of those new features include:

- A changed process model from fork-on-connect to fork-pool.  This
dramatically improves the performance and allows it to scale to many more
concurrent users.

- Improved internationalisation language file support.

- Image replacement for advert removal.

- Added support for HP/UX.

- Added support for fully qualified addresses in banned and exception IP
lists.

- Improved run-time options.

- Improved logging.

- Added URL Greylists.

- Added filter group support so different filtering settings can be used for
different groups of users.

- Added a '-g' gentle restart that does not kill current connections but
filter group config is re-read.

- Added intelligent list managing so that if different filter groups use the
same file they will share one copy of it.  It also means it does not need to
read in two copies.  The list managing also caches the lists between restarts
thus reducing restart speed dramatically.

- Ident now uses X-Forwarded-For when DansGuardian is configured to use it.

- Added a temporal denied page bypass facility.

- Added feature where when a user is not found the IP is checked for in the
filter group list.

- Added support for unescaping HTML content.

- It is no longer needed to run as root to bind to a low port.


Over the 15 months a lot of people have put effort into writing, testing and
supporting this software.  Far too many to mention here.  I would like to
extend my gratitude to those people.  I hope you like the software and you
can look forward to many new exciting features in the future.


Daniel Barron
Wed 21st July 2004