I've been a very happy consumer of Khaled Mardam-Bey's product since it first became available. Liked it? Heck, I even paid the registration fee. But, before Mr. Mardam-Bey rests too comfortably on his laurels, there are two significant features he should have added to his mIRC application long before the fancy scripting, the color codes and the sound effects.

The first of these is the sarcasm font. What sarcasm font? Everybody customizes their mIRC to show text in any font they prefer. So, when somebody posts the opposite of what they really mean, expecting everybody in the channel to realize they're being sarcastic, we're supposed to accept the resulting misunderstanding among the shortcomings of a text-based medium. Would it be asking too much for Mardam-Bey to devise a simple solution, such as a sarcasm font or an italicization switch or something?

And the second long overdue feature is the reverse ignore. Everybody is familiar with the /ignore feature. The chatter who is tired of TrollWeed's blathering can just type /ignore TrollWeed and make it all go away. The only trouble is, TrollWeed gets to continue making snide remarks about you to the rest of a channel behind your back without you even realizing that your own chat is inadvertently supplying him with more ammunition.

What we need is a reverse ignore function, which would selectively render the chatter's own posts invisible to TrollWeed and nobody else in the channel, thus denying TrollWeed any further provocation.

I'm sure anybody who's spent whole years chatting on IRC will appreciate the benefits of these two propositions. Whether they're even feasible enhancements to the IRC protocol is a matter for the esteemed Mardam-Bey to fathom out.

There are a whole bunch of conventions widely used across plaintext mediums to indicate sarcasm - asterisks around the word, uppercase, underline - is there really a need for another?

As far as reverse ignore, its simply not within the capabilities of mIRC as an IRC client to do that. Any kind of selective exclusion of who receives a message in a channel would have to be implemented by the IRC daemon (server software). But is it really an issue? Generally if there's a problem with a user there are two approaches: ignore them and not care what they say behind your back or ban them and not give them the opportunity to read what you say or bother anyone else on the channel. Obviously if you aren't an op on the channel that's not much good but usually there'll be an op available who will take control of the situation. But like I said, mIRC doesn't control who receives the messages you send to a channel, the server does.

Anybody who's spent +a whole month+ chatting on IRC knows that neither suggestion can be implemented by an IRC *client*.

Firstly, it is impossible to "reverse ignore" with current IRCd software. This feature would needed to be implemented by the ircd itself, since mIRC has *zero* control over who receives messages you send to a channel. Zero. You can outright forget this one, or see if maybe the network you use has such functionality.

As for sarcasm, what's wrong with simply using *asterisks* or the ever-useful "</sarcasm>" tag. You're trying to ask Khaled to solve a linguistics/typographical problem, not a technical one. There are already many ways to communicate sarcasm on IRC. My friend once tried to convince me that all sarcastic text should be surrounded by +'s. +That sure worked out well+. There is simply no way for Khaled to impose useless typography conventions on people when such conventions already exist.

someone takes IRC seriously

I always thought the reverse ignore was to mode the channel +m and voice everyone BUT the jerk ...


(what's sarcasm?)

Wow! Brilliant post! I'm not sure it's to point out the how obnoxious IRC chat has become... or just to see argv's response to such ludicrous nonsense. Bravo, I say!

It's called sarcasm, jerk. Now crawl back under yer rock and shut up.

You would think in 2009 clients could support italics atleast.

Italics have been used for thousands of years in literature. It's something that a normal person might naturally expect to do, not nescessarily for sarcasm. But for emphasis in general, As you see italics used in the real world.

Only to be told that in the IRC world we abuse bold and other characters. The reverse control code is stupid and should be replaced by italic. Other clients took the lead on this 10 years ago, If mIRC was not so stubborn then it would have become standard by now, and would be better.

I disagree with that as I use reverse almost daily. I do agree however that italics would be a great addition.


I guess if it were really all that important, then those other clients would be on top instead of mIRC.