Not constantly, only when there's a change. People are not going to be constantly changing their status.
Anyway, what's the difference in the amount of traffic between the server sending a notice to 25 people and the server sending a nick change message to 25 people in a channel by someone trying to broadcast that they're away? Practically nothing.
Actually, the notice method causes far less traffic then the nick change method. With the current practice of changing your nick to show your away status, not only are you sending a nick message to your 25 buddys, you're sending a nick message to the other 100 or so people in the channel who don't care about your status. Depending on the number channels you are in, and the number of people in each channel, you could be sending hundreds of unwanted, useless messages everytime you change your status.
The standard convention of changing your nick to show yourself away is huge waste of bandwidth, whereas, if the notice method I'm proposing became the convention, it would eliminate
all those unnecessary nick messages, sending notices only to the small list of people you want to reach who are online at the time saving huge amounts of now wasted bandwidth.
Another thing this fixes, you don't have to be on the same channels as your buddys to see if they are online. Maybe you're only joining a channel to wait for a friend to be online and are ignoring the conversation in that channel. Think of the vast amount of bandwidth being wasted by people lurking in channels so they can see when they're friends are online.
My proposal is more bandwidth efficient than mIRC's notify list even. When using that, every 30 seconds, mIRC sends and ISON to the server, and the server sends and ISON response back. Think of all the ISON messages passing back and forth that don't convey any information because no one has come online or gone offline in that 30 second interval. With my method, a message gets sent
only when something has happened; only when there's some usefull information to convey.
Oh, the waste that's out there now!
I wouldn't be surprised if we cut server traffic by well over a quarter by implimenting my proposal.
