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Raccoon Offline OP
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Premise: When sending messages to a user who has an away message set (/AWAY), you will receive that away message from the server (RAW 301). You will receive it each time, over and over, when you message and respond to the user as long as they have an away set. A conversation will become interleaved with these away messages, and so it becomes obnoxious.

I wish to suggest that mIRC automatically suppresses these messages after the first one is displayed.

Getting into technicalities, Away Message Suppression should be based on these conditions:

- The target's nickname remains unchanged.
- The away message contents remains unchanged.
- Suppression expires after 7200 minutes (2 hours) since the last 301 was received.
- Suppression is temporarily disabled while performing a /WHOIS on the user, between RAW 311 and RAW 318, because RAW 301 is also displayed in /WHOIS.

I have written an example mIRC script to demonstrate this behavior. The intent of this feature request is not to require all mIRC users to utilize this script to enjoy its benefits.

Code:
#MuteAwayMsg on
RAW 301:*: {
  var %nick = $2, %awaymsg = $3-
  if ($hget(miscellaneous,MuteAwayMsg. $+ $cid $+ %nick) == %awaymsg) { halt }
  hadd -mu7200 miscellaneous MuteAwayMsg. $+ $cid $+ %nick %awaymsg
} ; by Raccoon 2017
#MuteAwayMsg end
RAW 311:*: .disable #MuteAwayMsg
RAW 318:*: .enable #MuteAwayMsg


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Vogon poet
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Easier solution would be not to chat with people who insist on keeping their away status enabled when they are not away.

Getting into technicalities: it shouldn't be mIRC's "job" to bend around people who insist on using IRC the wrong way.
Away status together with away message exists for a reason and that is to inform you that the person you are messaging is away and thus cannot answer you. If that person in fact is not away they should cancel their away status.
In fact mIRC has even that angle covered with optional setting "Cancel away on activity".

So from that perspective I really see no reason why mIRC should have feature like that implemented. For the select few who are in a situation where they need to regularly chat with people who insist on keeping their away status enabled while they are not away the simple solution would be to use the script you provided in your post.


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Raccoon Offline OP
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Sorry Brax, I was away when you wrote out that post. I hope you weren't flooded by away messages each time you hit enter... that would be annoying.

Anyway, mIRC proudly sports many features to hide repetitively-useless information from the display to promote a cleaner chat experience: Hide MOTD, Hide Names, Hide Join Part Quit Kick Nick Mode Topic CTCP events, Hide Ping? Pong!, Hide excessive Bold Underline Color Reverse formatting, Hide user addresses, and even a fine-grained Ignore feature to hide all of the above on a per-user basis.

Senseless away-reminders are just another one of those things that doesn't need to saturate our screens.


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No I wasnt flooded at all... I sent my message, got your away message and didnt see any point of typing out another message before you return. Sort of what my initial point was, you are away so I dont chat with you while you are not around to answer me smile

1) Hide MOTD. Frankly I dont understand why mIRC even does that. It's displayed only once when you connect to the server, so I don't really consider that flooding.

2) Hide names. This is "technical information". You probably don't have any use for that in the presented form anyway so its okay to hide it. Afterall the names will be displayed in the nicklist.

3) Hide Join Part Quit Kick Nick Mode Topic. Thank god those are optional. Frankly thats another part of the information I dont quite get why you would want to hide. (I have seen more then once people addressing channel messages to people who have already left the channel. And later saying oh yea I have the joins and parts turned off).

4) Hide Ping? Pong! Thats again "technical info" it serves no purpose for the general user (unless you have very unstable connection and you use it to inform you of potential lost connection).

5) Hide excessive Bold Underline Color Reverse formatting. I suppose that is primarly a defence feature? Or yes perhaps also an aesthetic preference.

6) Hide user addresses. Again for majority of users that info doesn't really serve a purpose. Apparently for most people IP address is equivalent for voodoo magic.

Away message however serves a very specific purpose. The person you are messaging is not around and cannot answer you right now. This is an info you need to see.
Also a lot can happen within 2 hours. A person can return and go away many times and possibly use same away reason. Supressing the messages after you receive it first time will take away that information from you.

Why you didnt answer me? But didnt you see I was away. Yes but that was almost two hours ago. Oh but I came back and went away an hour later again after we chatted a while. Oh sorry I didnt even see it as my chat program automatically hides this information from me.

Now don't take me wrong I have nothing against introducing new features when they benefit majority of users. Its just my personal opinion that this feature is just not one of those.

Considering that most of the "fullscripts" have away systems built in that let people set themselwes away when they are idle and so on I would say that utilizing away messages is actually something that most people like. (You could also consider the fact that lot of scripts send out away message as a standard message instead of relying on server sending it. In which case mIRC wouldnt block those anyway.)

Bottom line is. If such thing is implemented it absolutely needs to be optional.


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I agree with raccoon on this. I've encounter multiple people that I want/need to converse privately with but for reasons they keep their /away active.

For me, I use /away as "not paying attention to mIRC". If I see I've been highlighted or received a new private message(via mIRC icon blinking) I swap over and have a quick chat but completely forget about my away message being set until 30minutes into a conversation when the user brings it up.

No one is saying it should be mandatory; like 95% of mIRC's features it should be completely customizable


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Sat Offline
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To me, the takeaway of these posts is that mIRC should enable "Cancel away on activity" by default..


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Raccoon Offline OP
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But other users and bots leave it on to advertise whatever.


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Originally Posted By: FroggieDaFrog
No one is saying it should be mandatory;

Based on Raccoon's first post the suggestion was that mIRC should suppress away messages automatically.
But really... as long as such things are optional I don't care too much.

Originally Posted By: Sat
To me, the takeaway of these posts is that mIRC should enable "Cancel away on activity" by default..


Precisely! That would be the logical solution. If you implement features that combat user stupidity/laziness/ignorance then this approach would make the most sense.


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Hoopy frood
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Quote:
To me, the takeaway of these posts is that mIRC should enable "Cancel away on activity" by default..

I think the reason this was disabled by default is privacy - a user may want to appear as away eg. if they are talking privately with someone else or working on a script on a private channel, and so on.

One possible solution could be: if you message someone while they are away and they reply, mIRC could temporarily hide subsequent away messages eg. for the next five/ten minutes.

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Originally Posted By: Khaled

I think the reason this was disabled by default is privacy - a user may want to appear as away eg. if they are talking privately with someone else or working on a script on a private channel, and so on.


Privacy conscious users generally know how to check the boxes that they need. While most beginners might not even know there is an option they can tick that lets them cancel the away status automatically.

Originally Posted By: Khaled

One possible solution could be: if you message someone while they are away and they reply, mIRC could temporarily hide subsequent away messages eg. for the next five/ten minutes.


Five to ten minues sounds more reasonable than originally proposed 2 hours. Or perhaps an option to set "Ignore subsequent away messages for [xx] minutes".


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Hoopy frood
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I have been testing out variations on this theme and, so far, a good approach seems to be: once an away message has been displayed in a query window, further away messages are hidden for the next sixty seconds. This allows you to send multiple messages without seeing umpteen away messages. If a message arrives from the user, the hide timer is reset to sixty seconds again. This seems like a reasonable balance between not filling the query window with away messages and not under-reporting the server's away state for the user.

If no query window is open, away messages are displayed normally for every message you send.

How does that sound?

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Vogon poet
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Quite frankly - and not trying to sound like someone who argues simply for the sake of the argument - I personally still think that this is "fixing something that isnt broken".

However as far as the proposed solution goes then yes 60 seconds supression sounds much more reasonable than originally proposed 2 hours in my opinion.

Originally Posted By: Khaled
If a message arrives from the user, the hide timer is reset to sixty seconds again.

Any message or specifically an away message?

If it resets only on away message then the screen would still be filled with quite a lot of away messages during a lengthy conversation making this whole thing somewhat useless again.

If it indeed resets on any messages then I suppose it should be serving quite reasonably. Sort of reminding you on longer pauses that the person you are talking to in fact claims to be away while keeping the constant nagging at bay during active "bursts" of chatter.


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I'm with Brax on this one, I'm not a fan of such an option and if this is implemented, I hope it will be implemented as an option, that the default behavior will remain the same.


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Raccoon Offline OP
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Looking at my chat logs, 60 seconds is too short of a time. That is a very short period of time in even a fast paced and aggressive conversation, especially with somebody who is indeed multi-tasking and going afk. At least 10 minutes please.


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Vogon poet
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I'm sorry but no! According to MY logs the time should be 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

This is precisely what the scripting engine is meant for. Ability to cater specific needs of an user via flexible scripting language. And in your opening post you already provided the solution in just 9 lines of code.

(And yes now im really arguing just for the sake of argument. grin)
Allthough I still maintain the strong view that this is something that mirc should not tamper with by default in first place and if the decision is made to implement it then just like Wims said earlier it needs to be optional.


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For me the problem is that getting the same away message is not adding any new information to me.

Why not just hide the away message reply unless the message changes? Then show the new away message, then auto-hide recurring messages of that same message.

The option could simply be "Hide recurring away messages that are the same"


/tokenize 32 $gettok($1-,1-,32)

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