Forums General Discussion COLORED NICKS

sir Khaled... our network are using colored nicks and ascii characters.. if you could configure the nicklist to accept color codes and not display them as a code but the color itself on your next version of mirc.

thanks!

www.chatpinoy.org
First Filipino IRC Network!

Well first of all I'll point out that I don't have anything to do with the development of mIRC. Now that's out of the way...

I hope support for that isn't added, simply because control codes in nicks is stupid. It basically means that anyone using your network must be at the mercy of whatever clown colours your users decide to put in their nicks or otherwise strip them and then be unable to use hotlinking on those nicknames and perhaps (depending on how you've set it up) even be unable to tell two users apart because their nicks vary only in colour. The original IRC RFC may be a little restrictive on what can and cannot be in a nickname or channel name and it's not uncommon for a network to extend beyond it, but there are some things which shouldn't be allowed on grounds of pure common sense. I'm afraid you've crossed that line.

How praytell does channel hosts on your network ban people using their nickname in the banmask then? Especially if they choose to make mIRC ignore control codes? Whoever wrote the IRCd needs their head examined as I doubt there is an IRC client that would readily be compatible with such a stupid function.

I'd be more inclined to ask that all ASCII except a - or _ be removed from any future development of the nickname protocol unless such characters represent letters of foreign langauges that I am not aware of.

[, ] and | are commonly used though.

nick|bbs
nick[tv]

etc

And?

Agreed! Remove all that other crap!

As much as I respect other peoples opinions, I have never been able to fathom why people dislike nicknames such as nick[tv] or nick|bbs. It just...doesn't bother me at all. The only nicknames which slightly bother me are on networks that allow 30 character nicknames like DALnet, where you get "I^Am^HeRe^For^U^AnD^SeXY|BRB" etc, and even then it's only when they talk in the channel.

Anyway, just as it just "doesn't" annoy me for no reason, I guess it just "does" annoy you for some reason. Neither right nor wrong - Such is the wonder of the human brain! Nevertheless, putting your opinions into practice would cause chaos and be unfair for the huge amount of people that do make use of such characters. So, realistically speaking, it's not going to happen :tongue:

Regards,

I'm not making any representation as to what is popular, it just looks stupid. That's my opinion, nothing else. When you look at the nickname protocol and the restrictions it does have it is a little surprising to see that it does allow these other characters for no apparent reason than to let people look fearsome or like a script kiddie.

It depends. There's good uses and bad uses of ascii characters.

Good uses: nick|brb, nick[tv], and so on

Bad uses: ^^^^OMG^ROLF^^^^ and so on. But then, even - and _ can be used in a moronic way (a________ or even just ________), and so can letters and numbers (aaaaaaaaaaa, OmG1AmS03L3E7).

It's not the characters, it's how they're used.

I do agree though that color in nicks is completely stupid. God knows it's annoying enough when people decide it's cute to always talk in bold underlined white with a bright green background or what have you. At least that I can filter out with no adverse effects...

the reason for [,],{.},\, and | is that they are characters in the (Swedish? Finnish?) character set. Perhaps a historical artifact, but I don't really see why a full Unicode characterset shouldn't be acceptable. The problem is that computing is very Western-centric, and thus 7-bit ascii is the de-facto, lowest-common-denominator of text encoding.

What would need to be addressed if a full unicode system was in place would be how to allow backwards compatibility. How do you know it doesn't handle them? Some sort of capability query, perhaps, rather like the MSN protocol uses? Then what do you transmit to a client that cannot handle 64bit characters? Presumably the last 7bits of that char plus a leading '0'...

Anyway, is it really a mIRC issue, apart from conforming to what the servers implent?

- It's not up to mIRC or any other client to simply conform to whatever the servers implement, it's up to clients and servers to conform to the IRC protocol or reasonable revisions of it.

Point taken - anything that is an extension of the protocol shouldn't impact on a client (or a server) that does not implement that addon. In essence that's what I was thinking; words came out a bit skewed!