Forums Feature Suggestions AUTOMATIC color highlighting to make it easier?

(Before you respond, I am not talking about the existing highlighting option in the addressbook)

Hi,

would it be possible to have mIRC automatically assign colors to different people in a channel, so that they can more easily be told apart? It's a bit tiring to mentally scan for the nicks when trying to find the scrollbacks of a specific person. Currently I highlight my own nick and it's VERY helpful, but I'd like to see automatic coloring done on other people's text.

Example:
-mIRC user joins a random channel
-person1 says something. Line is automatically colored blue.
-person2 says something. Line is colored red.
-person1 says something. Line is blue.
-person3 says something. Line is green.
-so on and so forth
-if user joins a second channel, mirc starts by assigning blue/red/green again (colors are reused in every chan, they're not global)

Optionally, color reassignment:
-20 minutes later, some 20+ colors have been assigned, and mirc is running out of easily distinguishable colors. person2 hasn't spoken in 15 minutes, so red is reused.

This can currently be achieved only if the user manually assigns colors to each nick. This is meant for random people, the channels I go to have hundreds of people all of whom are strangers to me, so manually adding everyone to an addressbook and manually changing colors is NOT a good alternative (not to mention I'd run out of meaningful colors quickly since they're global).

Any hope of seeing this in the next mIRC?

mIRC only has 16 colors and one will be the same as the background color. So at most, you have 15 colors to work with. 15 out of hundreds isn't going to be much use. Unless the channel is basically dead and everyone is just idling all of the time, you'll constantly be reassigning colors because you'll run out over an over.

And, imo, a rainbow of text in a channel is hardly easier to read. Coloring specific people's text is one thing if you only color a few people. Coloring everyone's just gets messy. As far as making something to do what you are asking, it could be scripted if anyone feels like doing so.

Write a script to do it and you can see it in the current mIRC. This is the epitome of script usage.

By the way, the address book and automation are not dichotomous. You can script mIRC to automatically add users to the address book with random colours. In fact, one way to script this would be:



Of course, this doesn't highlight the entire line, just the nickname, but you can use $cnick($nick).color to create a custom /echo line for the message. I'm sure you can expand on this, or you can ask in Scripts & Popups for someone to help out.

I have an old script that does pretty much exactly what the OP is describing, except that it only colors the nickname instead of the entire line. The script itself is not too complicated if you use /cnick. Like argv0 said, there are only 15 useable colors, but I felt only about 6-7 of them are good choices on a white background.

Ultimately I think adding more than 16 colors to mIRC should come first. Otherwise there just aren't enough colors to make it work well on larger channels.