When you set this to 'yes' you get more options...
See next (modified) copy-paste from April 2020, which had to be reverted
because PCRE2 was broken. Now it's an opt-in and hopefully matured a bit.
This means:
* Case insensitive matches work better in UTF8 now, such as extended Latin.
For example, a spamfilter on "ę" now also matches "Ę", while previously
it did not catch this.
* Other PCRE2 features such as https://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/pcre2syntax.html#SEC5
are now available. For example you can now set a spamfilter with the regex
\p{Arabic} to block all Arabic script, or
\p{Cyrillic} to block all Cyrillic script (such as Russian)
Use these new tools with care, of course. Blocking an entire language,
or script, is quite a drastic measure.
All of this was possible because of the new PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF
compile time option which was introduced in PCRE2 10.34. Now, that
version turned out to be buggy. As recent as PCRE 10.36 some major bugs
were fixed. This also means we now require at least PCRE2 10.36 version
so everyone can benefit from this new spamfilter UTF8 feature, IF they
enable set::spamfilter::utf8-support, that is.
Many systems come with older PCRE2 versions so this means we will
fall back to the shipped PCRE2 version in UnrealIRCd. This means
./Config will take a little longer to compile things.
For packagers (rpm/deb/ports): if you choose to patch configure to
not require such a recent PCRE2, then please do not allow enabling
of set::spamfilter::utf8-support since it will likely cause crashes
and misbehavior. Check PCRE2 changelog, CTRL+F at PCRE2_MATCH_INVALID_UTF
Bram Matthys
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