Instead of having people change their nicks to reflect their away status, why not have their nick on the nicklist become italicized when they are away? I think that will help especially when you go on IRC networks that have really short nicklenght limits and it will save you that task of switching you nick back and forth alll the time. I have seen this feature on another IRC client.

Also, would it be possible to allow for nicks in the address book to include other modification options such as BOLD? This could add another option for us to differentiate the nicks on the nicklist from each other besides color.

Thanks,

Nomadic_Prophet

its a nice idea but its practically impossible. mIRC would have to /who everyone in the channel regulary to find out their away status and on some networks that would get u disconnected.

Unless all mIRC clients, for example, going into away made a ctcp to the channel marking their away status but i don't think channel owners would appreciate having people ctcp'ing the channel every time they go away or come back.

[Edit] Added the words "for example"

Which other IRC client implemented that? There's no notification of when someone sets themelves away or back so the only way for a client to tell is to continuously 'ask' the server using /who requests. Besides being messy, it'd also be a very considerable -and most likely unwelcome- drain on any IRC server if 95% of the users suddenly stat sending /who requests for every channel they're on every few seconds.

The only way that such a thing would become feasible is if it were implemented on the server side via some kind of notification of changes in a user's status.

Xchat has user status checking. It colours users who are away in a shade of grey, though I don't know how it goes about performing this check.

using a packet sniffer i found that xchat just does a /who $chan when it joins a channel, does a /whois on someone who changes nick, and /who's the channel every 60 seconds.

Which means that overall, it is a REALLY bad client from the servers point of view because it uses a LOT of bandwidth to achieve nothing.

I think it was Chatzilla, but XChat has the away feature as well, if I am not mistaken. They have some pretty cool features that would be cool to have in mIRC like making links look like links, and when a person talks for more than one line the nick is not repeated on each line, just the first. Also a status bar that shows IP addresses when you point at a nick, etc., etc.

I am not sure how the away thing works, regarding your /who point, but it works and I doubt it would have been put into an IRC client if it would be an inconvenience, but I could be wrong.

I dont know what network you are on, but the ones im on the users often only set them self away, no need to change nick for it.. and the most users have a away script of some type, that means that they often sends a notice to the person that he/she are just away, but i shouldent nag to much about this, my sheme coloring the away nick as the user want it to.. default away people is blue.. but as said befor it using /who #channel . and this cosing mirc to lag from time to time, and i would hate to see a clean mirc lag like that. so i dont think it will be included in mirc..

actually it COULD be done somewhat. mirc can already color nicknames who are idle in the channel a separate color and as far as I know it doesnt whois them at all to find this out.

$nick(#,<nick/N>).idle...
it doesnt check their idle time in general, just in the chan..

Hmm, maybe it was idle and not away that I was seeing in the nicklist. I did not even think of that.

Anyhow, it is nonsense that this will be a burden in the IRC servers or affect the performance or the IRC client. Many people use the IRC client and it would have been a known issue if it affected server performance and on the client side. I have tried these clients and the have these features and I know that it does not affect their performance, So I don't know what people are basing that assumption on.

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes I know that. I was offering up an alternative solution in the meantime.

- It's not nonsense, you're just not thinking this through. Chatzilla and XChat combined probably account for around 1-2% of users on any IRC network at a given time, the proportion of mIRC users would be around 90-95%. That's a massive difference in how each one's traffic usage affects an IRC server.

From a few quick tests I conducted, the /who # reply for a channel of 10 users averages to be around 1 KB, give or take. that doesn't sound like much when you're only doing it once per minute, but say 60 people do it that often.. that averages out to 1KB/s extra load to the server. 6000 people doing it would come to an extra 100KB/s, but that's assuming that everyone is in only one channel, and that their channel is relatively small. It doesn't seem like much when only one person does it, but if you add up everyone doing it, you will probably end up increasing each server's load by an amount in the MB/s range. Additionally, each time a client requests that information, it takes CPU cycles for the server to determine the replies. It adds up quickly.

With mirc holding the vast majority of the irc client market, changes like this would affect everyone, so Khaled has to be more careful than the authors of most other clients. It sounds like a nice feature in theory, but in practice, it's an evil abomination that should not see the light of day.

Just one man's opinion

Well, I guess some servers will be screwed then if a lot of people start using these other clients.

Im sure the airlines would be rather screwed if everybody started shipping & traveling by boat...... but I know thats not gonna happen either is it.

If by some bizarre event one or both of those clients gained a massive portion of the IRC user clientele then many servers would probably be forced to put restrictions on /who, either by ignoring more than x requests per user per hour, or even putting a vey low tolerance on what was considered 'flooding' when using /who. They might even have to limit the number of people using those particular clients, perhaps block them entirely. Ultimately this would mean that those clients would either have to drop or severely limit support of this feature to being practically useless, or otherwise face their users being banned from the majority of IRC servers.

Geez, I was being sarcastic. It was just an idea, I may not even be right about the feature being related to being away, but instead just idle.

This sort of feature would probably have to run on the server side. Maybe in the form of a list of all the nicks in the channel and along with each their away or idle status. Then the status of the nicks could be checked when you join the channel (if the mode is already set) or one signal set to the nicks in the channel once, when the mode is set/removed. I don't think this has to be a sort of thing where a client should have to be checking status every so many seconds.

Anyway, this would not be something that mIRC could do, but for the sake of the disussion, that was just what I pictured. I could be wrong though about how much even this method would affect the servers.

Thanks for the feedback all. At least I know now that it probably can't be done. At least with mIRC...

Thanks

You're either confused or confusing :tongue:

I agree, this is the way it should be: the servers will have to work this way, ie send a notification when a nick changes their away status. mIRC cannot do anything towards that direction until servers support it.


This is exactly what x-chat (and other clients) currently do to 'implement' this feature.


No, "at least" isn't correct. You have to understand, if you haven't already, that:
1) this isn't a mIRC limitation
2) other clients that keep track of users' away status do a /who every X seconds. They don't use some sort of server-side notification feature, simply because it doesn't exist (yet).

Presumably when he says 'At least with mIRC...' he means that mIRC's popularity makes it stand out as perhaps the only client which cannot implement the /who method since no other client's userbase would be large enough to create an issue. Of course it is still possible with mIRC using a simple script.

As for away notification in general, even a server-side implementation could be problematic as a means of abuse. It would effectively give a single user the ability to send something to every user they share a channel with. That's the kind of thing flooders and DoS'ers dream of.

The easies way to do this is to make the server send a message to all the IRC clents when someone marks themselves as away

Perhaps it would be abused, at least at first, but I don't see it as a serious problem. Especially if the away reason isn't sent, changing the away status would be no more abusive than /nick. And just like in nick changes (or joins/parts etc), channel operators would be able to easily remove "away flooders" from the channel.

That is an over-exaggeration. I'm 100% sure that no server will ever ban someone for excess use of the /who command. If there was an excess load on the server, some servers might add a feature that would tell everyone in a channel when people went away if they had a certain umode turned on. But you can't deny the evolution of mIRC because some servers might get more use.

(I guess I am just confusing) :P

The more I think about this, the more you see how there can be problems. I understand with those who are critical of this idea, it is probably not a simple feature to add to IRC. Hopefully there is a way somehow to implement this in the future instead of having to change your nick to show you are away and having a nick become italicized when idle for a certain time.

The problem is that it will likely need to be a server side feature and thus have to be offered through the IRCds, and there are many different ones used by all the different networks.

I also agree that there may be a server load issue if some people switching their status back and forth. But how different is that from say, already available modes such as +h, +i, +p, +x, or +R? Or even +v, +h, and +o? Maybe a new mode added for "away" like +A and showing on the nicklist with a second symbol such as ^ or whatever other symbol that is not taken.

So for example if you are a Channel Operator that is away your nick can have a @^ in front of it and the away nicks in a group can drop to the bottom of that group/level.

This would also add a feature IRC that mIRC does not support now, which is displaying two nick modes on the nicklist at once, such as a voiced nick (+v) that is away can look like +^Nickname on the nicklist. Also for a nick to be italicized on the nicklist.

Anyway, this is just an idea and this is probably not the place to get something like this implemented as a feature in IRC.

It was an interesting discussion anyhow, thank you all for the feedback. You brought some points I did not think of when I first posted this.

Thank you,

Away system is not problem for me, I use color nicks. But that I can't sort nicks by alphabet it's a problem. I don't like that nick jumps to ops and back avery 5 minutes -\ Is it hard to make generic sorting of a nicklist?
P.S. Excuse me for my english ^_^

Oh for christ sakes... do Windows users look anywhere outside their own small worlds?

I've been monitoring the AWAY/OPER status of users for years now. How you ask? I DON'T USE /WHO! Use /who repeatidly, and you'll just induce lag.

So what do I do then? I use /userhost. 5 nicks per line, 4 lines, every 30 seconds until everyone is the channel is checked, wait 5 minutes, repeat. Pretty simple huh? Imagine this concept was concieved of back before Windows 95 huh? I did not come up with this idea. I just stole it from Mac IRC clients.

Do not argue with me that /who is faster. The query ratio (that is the amount of information sent out and back) is uneven with /who. With /userhost it's more flat lined. Regardless, you put less demand on both the client and server using /userhost. Which is WHAT YOU REALLY WANT!

BTW, mIRC uses /userhost and not /who when looking up addresses not in the internal address list (buffer). It's the simplist way to look up an address.

irc already has an /away cmd... why not just have that cmd make your name italicized in nicklist...then if you come back it changes it back to normal... DING DING!!! WINNAH! ...dur

Because nobody else is notified when you use that command...