Forums Developers Undocumented mIRC features

I took the liberty of creating a small .chm file to document all of the previous undocumented features of mIRC that I am aware of. Many people requested it, so here it is.

If anyone has any suggestions of things to add, feel free to post.

Link: http://forum.swiftirc.net/viewtopic.php?p=155615#155615

Apologies for hosting it on another forum, it makes it much easier to update one post as opposed to having loads floating round everywhere.

Picture to whet your appetite:

Your examples for $remote are incorrect.

Yours:


Should be:





($remote & 3)

is the same as

(($remote & 1) && ($remote & 2))



-genius_at_work

Including links to sites you don't control in the help file isn't really good practice, but anyways I found it most informative!!

great stuff with loads of new things.
i wonder why khaled doesnt just keep it in the helpfile if he keeps the identifiers?

Err,

So what should he do, assume control of resources that don't belong to him instead?

That's the first time I've heard that, maybe you should donate this concept to the academic circles: "referencing sources/books/journals you don't control is bad practice. Only reference things you yourself have said." I'm sure Wikipedia could benefit from that too..... (sarcasm)

The truth of the matter is that referencing external sources is a reality of sharing knowledge. No one source has all the information you need. One day some of these sources may no longer exist and that will be sad-- that too is a reality of sharing knowledge.

It's not considered unethical to include a archived copy of said resource.



Referencing published material is a different story as it doesn't lead you directly to a source that might become non-existent. If I were to follow your apparent interpretation of my post, then citing a book wouldn't be citing a book at all, it would be like containing information in a footnote to go to a street address to read a poster that might be removed for the information cited. I did not tell



So why worry about the day when it "no longer exists" when it is perfectly legal/ethical to include a archived copy of said resources. Not a single one of the resources I noticed that he linked to has any policy against it.

I also admit I wonder as to why you jumped in on what felt to me as a full on attack on my post.

None of this is an "attack", but a clarification of copyright issues.



Can you reference your source for such a claim (no pun intended)? As far as I know, it is considered IP theft to copy someone's work without their permission-- in fact, that is the very thing "copyright" protects from. Archival is copying, referencing is not; this is exactly why referencing is the good practice and archival is not.

It is not sufficient to copy someone's work and then reference the author (without permission). That is not ethical. The author in question may not want their work attributed to yours, or may have their own reasons for having their work under their own control. I, for example, may not want my work written in anything published by the OP. That would be my right as author (if I was one).

A better real world example of this is any author who would not want "old versions" of their work floating around, but instead a direct link to the latest version of their work. That way they would avoid disseminating potentially wrong information under their authorship and be able to easily correct any mistakes without having the auxiliary sources (that would not be under their control) updated as well. They maintain this right when they authored the original version.

It is fair to ask permission to include such sources, but it is not fair to take the sources and *then* ask. You'll find that this same ethical issue is touched upon by the mIRC license agreement itself, limiting people from distributing mIRC as part of any package.



Have you never seen any citation of any online source in any publication? Never read a blog? Have you never seen Wikipedia? Let me introduce to at least one wikipedia entry that is full of such references (full of blog entries, forum posts, [online] news articles and many URLs that may eventually disappear). If anything, your claim is that the author of this help file should beef up the references (make them actual "references") to more accurately point to the author, not that he should copy them outright.

I will also point out that not having "a policy against" copying someones work is not justification for copying it. Copyright is implicit. The policy would have to explicitly allow its use, not simply have no mention of it.

I said archived, not copied. Have you never heard of web archival services such as the way-back machine?
This is my version of a archived page(Though I would include a note on the time and date the archive was created):
http://uploads.vibedev.net/.tl/doku.php.htm


Unfortunately the internet doesn't work like that.


Wikipedia is a online resource therefore it can be updated at whim. A local help file is not. Can you find in say a Microsoft helpfile, links to other resources? I believe our difference is you viewed more as a online article, and less as a help-file.

My apologies. I wasn't aware that it was possible to "archive" something without copying it. Silly me. However, the fact that the internet archive copies.. oh sorry.. "archives" data from websites without their permission does not automatically make the act ethical or legal.


The ability to look at google cache or the wayback machine for an old version of a website does not define "how the internet works". People may be able to look at history of pages, but the author may still wish that their most recent version is held front and center as the first source, not the second. I'm sure you wouldn't be to keen on having google's result for your homepage be the version from the wayback machine 3 years ago...

This would mean linking to the author's direct source first and only providing an archive upon request if the original source is no longer available. This would be done out of respect for the author's wishes, and the term "respect" sounds a heck of a lot more ethically correct than "I 'archive' what I want!".

Fortunately, the internet that I use does not act the way you describe, and so I still see references 99.9% of the time, not direct copi..er "archives".

Microsoft would never reference sources other than their own, but that's nothing to do with ethics.



Mithshark, that is certainly a valid point that you seemed to brush over. Microsoft does not set the precedent for Internet ethics, and, although I may have failed to reference the sources in the "conventional" manner, i.e. making a note of time and date last accessed etc etc, I find it much more courteous to the author of such a source that I leave their work intact for them to edit at will without having to worry about, as argv0 said:



Your quote of "the internet doesn't work like that." is certainly valid, but that by no means justifies directly copying someone else's work, even with a full reference. If we are to talk about ethics and respect for the author, I personally see it as more respectful to leave someone else's work intact, merely linking to it.

Thanks for the positive comments, and thank you genius_at_work for the correction.

Edit: It appeared argv0 addressed many of the issues covered in this post a few minutes before I made this post. Ah well.

Excuse my rough post, I also meant to include this quote

I was meaning copied out of the original context, as in quoting part, and not all of the resource.


I'm going to ignore this because ethics is a POV, and I consider it ethical, after all once work is published, it's out there.

I have nothing against it, other than a occasional slip, I never publish anything that I wouldn't want viewed. And I'm afraid they do define how the internet is works, I really don't see how it doesn't, after all they're part/resources of/on the internet.


I'll maintain that I think that all archives should link to the original source(with time and date of creation), however as you will no doubt agree with, a change may not suit the helpfile, therefore causing problems.

I will gladly continue this conversation with you, but I'd prefer to do it elsewhere(IRC ,PM , a new topic) as I don't think this is very respectful to the OP, I wouldn't want this in my topic.

Reply to everyone involved: Why must we always get into back and forth debates here, disecting what people say over and over? We are way off topic here.

To the OP, good work putting together the CHM.

*nods*

lol, i was the first to see this :P

Someone that have uhelp ? been trying to download it for some days now, and i cant get access to the file due Exceeded Bandwidth.

I bet Chessnut saw it first.

Not sure what you're referring to. Works fine for me. Just re-downloaded it to check.

I also could not download it in the morning, but it worked in the afternoon...
Just retry again and again.

been trying to download it for 5 days now, and every time i connect i get the same answer "Exceeded Bandwidth" bla bla bla, and it's not my bandwidth we talking about, i have unlimited.