Forums Feature Suggestions $chan().idle $query().idle $chat().idle and MORE!

I'd like to suggest that, in addition to $nick($chan,$nick).idle, we could have an idle property for other relevant identifiers.

$chan($chan).idle == seconds since someone last spoke/actioned/ctcp'd in $chan
$query($nick).idle == seconds since $nick last /msg'd or /describe'd or ctcp'd you.
$chat($nick).idle == seconds since anything was received via DCC Chat from $nick

I see this latter feature was just suggested the other day, but my original suggestion came from the lack of $chan().idle, which would be extremely handy for identifying channels to auto-minimize or auto-hide, or even auto-part based on their activity or thereof.
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Other properties I would like to see on $chan, $query, $chat and $nick($chan,$nick):

  .lines : keeps a running total of text/action events ($lines is useless as it counts the total of displayed lines, including events and wordwrap)
  .words : keeps a running total of words spoken in text/action events.
  .opened : returns the $ctime value when $chan $query $chat were opened.
  .joined : returns the $ctime value when $nick joined $chan. ($nick($chan,$nick).joined)

The inclusion of these properties ought to have little additional effect on mIRC's CPU consumption, but will greatly reduce the CPU consumption for the plethora of scripts that attempt to track this information themselves. Scripts that would benifit from these properties are flood kickers, idle kickers, stats bots and channel-friendly info bots which take channel activity into consideration before displaying repetative information.

These statistics can help identify users who have greater channel participation, and possibly grant them greater access the channel's resources. It can also be used to identify spammers-- users who just .joined recently and post an URL or #chan in their first 2 or 5 .lines. It can also be used to report On Join /msgs sent by users in a channel you just .opened, among countless other uses!

I know this post is asking for a lot, but I would be humbled if it took 3 years to add these... as long as they are added sometime.

- Raccoon

.joined could be a problem, what if you join after them?

It would return 0.

good point

Nice suggestions, useful and easy to implement. I definitely agree.

very nice ideas, they definately will be very useful. specially if khaled is kind enough to implement them in the next version

Excellent ideas, now if we can just convince khaled to use them, we're flying.

I can definatly use some of these things in my own script. It would inprove my performance too, and fix alot of problems within my script.

I wish to ammend my suggestion...


Instead, I wish for these to return the number of seconds since they joined or window creation... identical to .idle.

Example:
$nick(Raccoon,#mIRC).joined == 5
Raccoon joined 5 seconds ago.

If the user was in the channel before you joined, it should return $null

while this is old, I just found it cause I was thinking of making this suggestion. What I want to see (if nothing else) is:

$query($nick).idle and $chat($nick).idle