Forums Feature Suggestions Automatic wrapping of large IRC posts

The most important feature that could be added to mIRC, I think, is a fix for the biggest problem with IRC as a medium, namely the unreasonably low size limit on posts. The fix would be that if you write e.g. a 1000 character post, it should word wrap it into five lines of 200 characters each or whatever the size limit is, and post them one at a time (maybe with a short delay between to avoid triggering flood protection? I don't know how that works).

As evidence that this is needed, here's a conversation I just had with someone about the virtues of IRC as a medium:

(12:04:20 PM) AirOfWinter: God, not IRC.
(12:04:35 PM) rw271828: hmm? what do you have against IRC?
(12:04:57 PM) AirOfWinter: IRC, with its beastly short per-character limit on posts? Gahhhhh!
(12:05:22 PM) rw271828: oh yeah, that is its big downside
(12:05:52 PM) rw271828: but is remembering to hit enter every couple of lines really that big a problem?
(12:06:03 PM) AirOfWinter: Yeah.
(12:06:40 PM) AirOfWinter: There's a lot of times when I want to compose paragraphs.
(12:07:17 PM) rw271828: From a technical viewpoint, the only thing needed to solve that problem is to put a wrapping feature into an IRC client program, Which would probably be on the order of 10 lines of code
(12:08:17 PM) AirOfWinter: Nobody's done it, or at least they hadn't last time I looked at IRC clients.
(12:10:10 PM) rw271828: I suppose they haven't. Putting it into one of the open source ones shouldn't be terribly difficult. I personally use mIRC... I might see if the author is taking feature requests, and if so, if you don't mind, copy that part of this discussion as evidence that people want it very badly
(12:10:23 PM) AirOfWinter: I tried to straighten it out in mIRC with a script once, and was astonished at how much trouble it was. It didn't end up working well enough by the time I decided I wasn't going to RP in IRC anyway.
(12:10:49 PM) rw271828: yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be very doable with a script, which is why I haven't tried
(12:11:25 PM) AirOfWinter: Well, you were right. It didn't work well enough to be worth it.
(12:12:42 PM) rw271828: okay, the author asks that feature requests be posted in the appropriate forum he has set up for that purpose, so I'll do that. It would certainly be easy to implement given access to the code

This feature is (already) present in the current 7.x beta.

That's great news, thanks!

Why would someone let something like this keep them from using IRC altogether without at least trying to get it changed? It seems a bit silly to me.

~ Edit ~
Then again, the whole conversation seems scripted to me.

Just as a note, it is quite possible to script such a thing. I wrote one long ago for someone. It's not needed now, but it does work without any problems for anyone using 6.35 or older.

Exactly how does mIRC determine where to wrap messages when sending one?

If memory serves, there are some variables which complicate this:

1) Your maximum message length is affected by your nick, ident, hostname, and the name of the channel you're on. In other words, IRC servers don't enforce maximum length limits on message text, but rather upon the entire server event text: in ":nick!~ident@4.2.2.1 PRIVMSG #channel :message here", the part in red counts against your maximum message length.

2) Maximum event text length may vary by IRC server daemon or daemon configuration. (This is from personal experience; the IRC RFCs probably say otherwise, but, hey...)

3) I am unaware of any IRCd 005 token which states what the current server's maximum event text length is.

So, as far as I can figure it, for each specific IRC server, mIRC would have to send a very long test string through the server to itself to determine maximum event text length. Then it would have to factor the length of the user's nick/ident/hostname/channel_name in outgoing messages when determining where to wrap. Plus this would all have to be re-calculated for each channel joined -- or for any time the user changed his nick.

Just curious.

mIRC uses a set length of, I believe, 400 characters in the current beta. This is low enough for the majority of servers out there. Yes, it could be longer for other servers, but setting it to 400 makes it work on probably 98% of servers without a problem, so that's a decent cutoff without having to jump through hoops to get the exact maximum length possible on every server you connect to and tracking/storing that information.