Forums Feature Suggestions more extensive error dialog on invalid userid

I'm an IRC admin on a relatively small network, and I see alot of people trying to connect using an invalid userid (containing special characters etc).

I also see questions about this problem again and again on the forum.

maybe it's possible to give a dialog window explaining the most common errors on connect when they happen, which can be turned off if you want to ('dont show this window again' kind of thing)

this might solve alot of problems for people who are trying to connect with an invalid identd value, or invalid email address (part before the @ used as userid when identd fails).

or more comments at the email and identd field to not use anything else then lowercase characters and underscores for example just to be on the safe side for most networks.

The problem with having specialized dialogs for each different possible instance is that:

1. there are so many different reasons/causes for not being able to disconnect, that the sheer number of dialogs would be enormous.

2. there is no way to distinguish what the reason/cause is, since there are no RAW messages connected with each one. (Such as: 801 - Invalid Identd; 802 - Infected Drone, etc)

It should be possible to have the ircd give an extended explanation when it disconnects someone, ex. "/notice user You have been disconnected due to an invalid ident. The ident is the part of your host before the @. Your ident '89273\ncas' is invalid because it contained the '\' character. Only alphanumeric characters (A-Za-z1-9) and '-' and '_' are allowed."

-genius_at_work

i think he ment to give a general explanation which fits for most networks

The problem with making a solution for "most networks" is that every network uses different methods and messages when sending information to users who are disconnected (klined/glined/etc). Not all networks even disconnect users for having an invalid userid. Some networks just modify the userid to something that is acceptable (ie, changing abc/123 to abc_123).

The "ban" reason is a completely arbitrary string of words chosen by the person who set it, so without some sort of AI, mIRC couldn't know what the string of words meant. If the entire IRC community can get together and decide to use either identical ban reasons, or extend the raw system as I described in my first post. Raw codes are meant so that the IRC client can understand what a message means even if the "human readable" portion of the message differs from one server to another.

If someone is looking for more detailed d/c messages for a specific server/set of servers, then it would be simple to make a script that recognizes certain d/c messages and displays an informational dialog. Such a script would have to be constantly updated whenever the ban reasons changed, or it would no longer work for those messages.

I think a more-to-the-point solution would be for each server to provide a link to an informational website within its ban reasons. Ex, Klined- Invalid UserID, more info: http://www.server.com/klined.html#invalid_userid

-genius_at_work

i think he ment to give a basic description like use only letters and _
and not telling user what was wrong (only what could be wrong if at all)

If you mean that mIRC could give that explanation, then see my last two posts in this thread.

If you mean that the IRCd (server) could give that explanation, I completely agree.


-genius_at_work