Forums Feature Suggestions Flags beside nick name

I think why all of the time there were not Flag beside the nick names.

Flag (of country) beside each nick name (optionally) will make the mIRC more nice to work (you know where each nick name come from).

IRC is text-based. Inserting an image into the chat would no longer be text-only. You can script something that will place the country name next to the nicks (if you know the country for each person).

So, instead of Flag, I want that will be A Country Name.

Country Name.

And just how do u expect mirc to work out what country the chatter comes from?

most could be gotten from masks and abbreviation lists simply enough. Hell, this could prolly be scripted provided that all the necessary options in mirc were available

there is no formality in defining the country in internet addresses
some (many European that I have seen) put the country code somewhere in the reverse DNS, but a UK ISP might have the .UK or .NET or UK.Is.org

and most US addresses dont show anything to specify the country

it would be cute if you could do it, maybe an optional flag if you know culd be done (out of all the countries in the world, each flag would need to be in an icon file, and small, very small, eait i cant tell is that italy or what?)

well, as for the US, most show either a state, regional location or ISP name....... while that wouldnt show the STATE, it would show you which ISP they use and thus what country they're in. Im not saying it would be easy or even realistic, jsut saying it's possible (tho admitidly very tough)

one of my ip's dont dns at all (what here?)
one dns to .com.au (which is not the country im in)
one dns to .net (wheres that?)

These of course assume i havent vhosted with a address such as 127.0.0.1 im inside ya pc!

Im not saying it would be all inclusive, obviously there are ways that finding a specific country would be impossible, but then, this is not something I would even bother doing myself - seems like an aweful waste to me for a project this big for such a SMALL return

The best ways to do this (afaik) would be to either:

1) Only do this with people you know. Set up the country manually for each user in a hash table or a file and read in the data for that user. If there is a country listed for the user, then you display that with the nick. That's pretty easy, but only works for nicks you manually enter a country for.

2) Obtain the information from the $address of the user. You can get *some* automatically from that. Obviously, .uk is going to be a UK ISP. However, some countries sell their suffixes, so that's not even 100% certain. Many hosts don't list a country, so for those, just using $address won't do much for you. The best method in that case would be to socket a site like http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp ... you can then use the socket connection to search for the host information and find out where it is located. Keep in mind that this will only show you where the host is located... not where the user is located. In many cases, this will be the same, but not in all cases.

As a final note, if you go the route of socketing that site, it can cause you to lag considerably if a lot of text is being seen all at once. I would recommend having it only search each nick's host once (perhaps on join) and store the information so that you don't have to figure out the country everytime the user speaks. This should be relatively easy to do and would be better in the scripting forum if done.

Not replying to anybody in particular.. but.. the way scripts usually do this is just by parsing the host (not ip) and taking a guess (comparing against a list). Just script it yourself, not to show in the nicklist (like dc++ can), but script it to display when you do a whois.

I dont think something like this should be coded into mirc itself, it has very little practical use. Possibly for use in help chans, but then you can just whois users and guess anyway (or just ask), assuming they are not using vhosts or bouncers.