Re-published due to broken automation. Do not adjust your television set; there is no cause for alarm.

Changes between 7.1.9 and 8.0.0

Highlights

Detailed coverage of the major changes can be found in the dedicated Sopel 8 upgrade guide.

For users:

Python 3.8+ is now required
IRC connections are made with TLS on port 6697 if not configured
SASL EXTERNAL authentication is now supported
Plugins in ~/.sopel/modules are no longer loaded by default
- Use the core.extra setting to add this directory back if needed
Database options can be configured all at once in new db_url setting (useful for managed cloud hosting such as Heroku)
.blocks command accepts "nick" and "host" types now, and no longer lies about supporting "hostmasks" (further improvements to come)
Sopel no longer supports loading (very!) old Phenny/Jenni plugins
Several built-in plugins have been converted to external packages, to simplify maintenance and release-management going forward

For developers:

Identifier was moved to sopel.tools.identifiers and now supports dynamic casemapping; an optional casemapping or identifier_factory kwarg has been added to many object types to help manage this at runtime
- You can usually just pass bot.make_identifier as the factory function and things will Just Work™
- Feel free to use bot.make_identifier() yourself to get an Identifier representing any nick or channel name you get, e.g. as input to a command
The core.nick setting value is now returned as a str, not an Identifier
Capability negotiation is a first-class plugin API feature (see plugin.capability and the related documentation chapter)
trigger.sender attribute as passed to plugin callables is now None in cases where its value is meaningless (events with no channel/query context)
Numerous deprecated API features were removed:
- bot.privileges (use bot.channels)
- bot.msg() (use bot.say())
- sopel.web submodule (use sopel.tools.web)
Messages from other bots are ignored by default on supported networks, but plugins can opt back in with the @plugin.allow_bots decorator
STATUSMSG prefix is removed from trigger.sender if present and stored in a separate trigger.status_prefix attribute
- See documentation for bot.SopelWrapper.default_destination
bot.connection_registered is now the way to check whether the bot is connected to IRC, registered with the network, and ready for your plugin to send commands

admin:
- Added .raw command to make Sopel send a raw IRC line [#2104]
adminchannel:
- Refactored hostmask handling & added code comments/tests [#2222]
- Improved result of trying to kick the bot with .kick [#2240]
- Unified topic-mask management under .tmask with subcommands [#2601]
bugzilla:
- Extracted to its own package [#2481]
calc:
- Improved error handling [#2507]
- Improved help output & test coverage [#2530]

Removed support for EOL Python versions (2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, & 3.7), added testing on newer Python versions (up to 3.12), and modernized coding standards [#2062, #2073, #2123, #2124, #2134, #2136, #2138, #2205, #2213, #2227, , , , , , , , ]

Importing sopel.module now emits a deprecation warning [#2170]
Removed support for Phenny/Jenni plugin style [#2126]
Stopped searching bot.memory['url_callbacks'] for link handlers [#2121]
Deprecated bot.search_url_callbacks() [#2121, #2156, #2581]
Deprecated db.execute() [#2243]
Cleaned up parts of sopel.tools namespace
- Deprecated tools.web.entity() and its r_entity constant, to be removed in Sopel 9.0 [#2205]

Many, many additions & improvements to documentation [#1990, #2169, #2178, #2182, #2226, #2238, #2239, #2257, #2275, #2276, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ]