I know you say that even though it might not be used by a lot of people the option is there for people to use it if they wish - which is fair enough, but then again, what about the people that have to work on the protocol - putting effort into something that ends up not used (although I don't know how much effort would be needed)?
Next to none. There are a number of regular expression libraries readily available.
And if we applied that philosophy to everything suggested we'd have a whole bunch of stuff that is unwanted by most, but is there anyway for the minority who want to use it....seems a silly concept to me.
I'm fairly sure that even if the majority of users don't want/care about regex support, they will benefit from it at some point or another.
I'm not really too fussed about it being added to the /list command, but it will be
very useful for bans, I just suggested adding it for the list command as it won't take a huge amount of effort if it's added for bans.
2) /list will only send back the channels you requested. /list egg would send back "#egg" if it exists, not "#segg", "#eggs", etc.
The problem I have with this is that:
1) Why would you /list a specific channel, the general point of a /list is to find channels. Obviously if you're listing a specific channel you already know it exists, and if you don't, you can just /join #channel or often /topic #channel or /mode #channel.
One without IRC knowledge would assume that searching for a channel without wildcards would list the channel you searched for and that only.
2) So many people already know that it will do a wildcard search without the wildcard characters applied, I think this would just cause confusion and have a negative impact. Perhaps only in the short term though...
Since this is a thread about IRC expansion/changes i'm going to forget about what the majority of users understand for the time being.
Even if people are used to not using wildcards performing a wildcard search anyway it won't take them very long to figure out or ask someone how to perform a wildcard search.
3) You can specify a prefix to search for in /list, for example: /list &* will only send back a list of channels that start with &, channels that start with # wouldn't be listed.
Didn't even know you couldn't do this now
- Seems like a good idea, although &Channels aren't seen very much anymore in my opinion.
Maybe not on any of the major networks, there's still no good reason not to support this though.
but the topic is not always clear.
But keywords would be? If people are given the ability to set whatever keywords they want, it'll just be abused in some way. Plus, people will be just as vague or irrelevant in key words as they would with topics. Maybe because people enjoy being lame, maybe because if this were introduced people wouldn't understand the concept.
You may argue that there could be set key words, but as I said online, if there were different categories (like searchirc.com lists its channels), then how could there ever be enough to cover the entire range of IRC channel topics that exist? There are probably hundreds of topics. And okay, you may have an 'Other' category - but I think that's just as vague, if not more so, than any channel topic.
The keywords wouldn't be very specific, they would just give a general idea of what the channel is about, for example:
- Chat
- Computing
- Entertainment
