Thats cause you're thinking of it wrong. First off, ignore these "2bit scripts" and recall mIRC's notify list. It uses ISON. mIRC uses this by sending an ISON every N seconds to see who is online. That could be just as CPU/bandwidth intensive as an ISAWAY. Secondly, who says such a feature has to be implemented as ISAWAY? If I were to do it, I'd most likely make it an extension to the WATCH command. Where in addition to recording logon/logoff it can log away/unaway. In which case, the client would only make one request, when they connect, after that, it is handled internally by the server.
