a /who on the channel every 5 minutes is the least effective and most asinine method I've ever heard. the H/G flags in a /who response are inaccurate too, because they do not represent a person's /away status, unless you are on the same server as them. Performing /who on a channel, especially a large channel, is very resource intense for a server.. and every 5 minutes is simply inappropriate. performing a repetitious remote-server /whois is even more inappropriate and is not tolerated on may servers.
Consider having a channel of 100 people (a pretty small channel by most standards).
The average length of a single WHO response is around 160 characters. Lets just say 150.
You WHO a channel with 100 people in it, that means the server just sent you 15,000 bytes of data.
Now lets say all 100 people in the channel feel this away fad thing is too cool, so they're all WHOing the chan. That's 1,500,000 or 1.5 Megs of data.
Now lets say everyone's script is doing this every 5 minutes. In only one hour, the servers had to expend 30 megabytes to the channel for the purpose of AWAY STATUS. In one day, this amounts to ¾ of a GIG of USELESS traffic... which most of the time, nobody even paid any attention to all day.
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Let me reiterate, just pay attention to what someone says in the channel. If they haven't spoken in the channel for a long time, then consider them as away. You can write a script to do this, mIRC even saves a user's idle time in the IAL.
- Raccoon
