Define Away.
There are a half dozen different methods of telling whether a person has more or less left a discussion (topic, channel, server, network, keyboard, physical consciousness... take your pick). Some go by a person's idle time in their /whois or in their /ctcp finger, other's by the last time they spoke in that channel... or perhaps others are more concerned in how much that person has actually contributed to the conversation, before getting in a fuss over their presumed absence.
There are many figures you can retrieve from either the server or from more relevant sources (what your client sees in activity)... so no, it is not impossible to do, and probably not impractical if you're interested in only relevant data.
Easy? Probably not.
- Raccoon
