Forums Bug Reports mIRC sends multiple parameters with PASS

hi!

I was helping a user get connected to Undernet with the soju bouncer. Undernet states that mIRC allows for multiple parameters in PASS, and when I inspected mIRC's behaviour it indeed sends multiple parameters with the pass command when configured with /server.

However, this is very nonstandard. RFC1459, RFC2812 and the modern docs all state that pass has a single parameter. In fact, Undernet itself considers this behaviour broken and corrects PASS to contain a single parameter.

I helped this user to connect to undernet with soju (which only sends a single parameter) by adding spaces to their password. I think it would be best if mIRC also changes to using a single parameter, since this appears to be standard across all IRC clients and IRC networks.

Thanks for your bug report. I replied to your post earlier and think I may have misunderstood what you meant.

If I understand correctly: you are saying that if a user specifies a password with spaces, the client should not be sending a password with spaces in PASS? Or that it should use a colon for a password with spaces in PASS? Or...?

The comment you mentioned seems to indicate that a client should use a colon in PASS but RFC1459/RFC28XX do not specify a colon in the PASS definition.

I would say that both clients and servers have adapted to different interpretations and implementations, as well as compliance/non-compliance, with RFC1459/RFC28XX/etc. over the last few decades. mIRC itself has logon code that checks for eighteen different types/versions of IRCds to handle ircd differences in events/numerics/formatting :-)

Thanks for the reply, and context!

My reading of the RFCs is that PASS takes a single parameter, which (by the eBNF) should be colon prefixed if it contains a space. So it should be ok to send a password with spaces (in fact this is necessary for undernet's "register on login" functionality) as long as it's colon prefixed.

But also it's up to you whether this is a bug I mostly wanted to document the difference between soju and mIRC and how it seems like undernet thinks the former is "more correct".

Okay :-) After 30 years of working on mIRC, sometimes it's difficult to remember why a feature was implemented the way it was. I am pretty sure that at one time mIRC did not support spaces in passwords, so sending PASS with one word was fine. When support for spaces in passwords was added later by clients and/or servers, I probably had to decide whether or not to use a colon in PASS. Using a colon could have broken backward compatibility with existing servers at the time. Then again, this is just conjecture. Since I have never received a report of an IRC server having an issue with this, I am a little worried that adding a colon at this point would in effect create an issue where there technically isn't one with the majority of IRCds.