With many IRC servers now supporting CIDR address bans, it is practically a necessity for IRC clients to do so as well.
Even though custom CIDR ban/op/voice/etc. lists can be scripted with relative ease, internal support in mIRC (mainly for access levels in the User List) would be really nice and would make things much simpler.
I think this deserves a bump.
Just wondering...
Which irc servers are now supporting CIDR bans? I'm not aware of many. Which irc clients are currently supporting this?
I don't know if there is an IRC client out there that has internal support yet, and I didn't state otherwise over a year ago when I proposed this. I stated that it's practically a need now (perhaps exaggerating a bit).
As for servers, the ones that I can recall are ircu, ircd-ratbox (and ircd-hybrid), IRCnet ircd, UnrealIRCd and Bahamut (the last two only for akill, kline, gline, etc, last time I checked), which are some of the least important IRCd's out there...
And even if no server supported CIDR bans, it would still be a good idea to have a client that does so, since it's a nice way of leaving out troublesome users without having to ban the range of a whole ISP. This is the reason IRCd's started supporting this in the first place.
Edit: typo
I'll add a vote for some CIDR support.
Great for ignores as well as user list and bans.
I think we're on the same page that it's a good idea-- the problem I can forsee is that if only a few servers implement this its hard to tell if servers are implementing this in a standardized fashion or not. If mIRC chooses the current implementation and something changes down the line with the majority of other servers, it may become even more of a problem having it broken than not having it at all.
It wouldn't work in mirc the same way it works with irc servers: irc servers typically match the CIDR mask against the users' IP address even if they have a resolved hostname, while mirc cannot just resolve every hostname before doing the matching. It's always going to be half-broken in that sense anyway (this is not specific to CIDR bans btw); I would say stuff like this should remain in the realm of scripting.
That's actually a good point. I didn't think of it that way before. I guess I'm too used to being on servers that show the IP address.