There are a couple of soft forks that have gone through long ago in upstream Bitcoin but not yet in Namecoin. The most important ones are BIP16 and Segwit. BIP16 has not been activated yet as it was activated in Bitcoin through a scheduled time instead of through BIP34, and we never explicitly scheduled it in Namecoin after upgrading to Namecoin Core (while the BIP34 forks went through automatically). Segwit has not been activated because versionbits/BIP9 conflicts with merge mining.

Not having those forks is both a loss in functionality (mainly for BIP16) and a burden/risk when merging upstream changes, as Bitcoin might change things with the assumption that those forks are already done. Thus I think we should finally get them activated.

I already added a parameter for setting an activation height including for segwit (to get around the BIP9 issue) in 4cf6ddb. So all that remains is coordinating mainly with the biggest miners on an actual height and finalising it. I want to use this issue for tracking the effort.