[IRC-DEV] Re: [Coder-Com] NAMES showing +ov at a time problem

[Andrew Miller]

Quoting Ruben Cardenal <nikolas at terra.es>:

> Hi there,
> 
>   I'm a member of Irc-Hispano developers team, and we are having a 
> problematic issue. We have modified m_names() function so now the NAMES 
> reply marks to voiced and opped users at a time with "@+nick" instead of 
> "@nick".
> 
>   This implementation seems to work properly with mIRC. But... for this 
> to work with BitchX, as this client uses WHO reply to fill its nickname 
> list for a channel, we had to modify it too. No problem with this, now 
> BitchX recognizes properly all modes. X-Chat works well too.
> 
>   The problem comes with kvirc and ksirc. These two clients get confused 
> when parsing those two modes, and have problems to display them and even 
> recognizing users as connected. I suppose that many other clients may 
> have potential problems with this.
> 
>   Even if changing the way of showing nicks in names from "@+nick" to 
> "+ at nick", new problems appear in clients such as mIRC. We think that if 
> all major networks make the same change in the way that NAMES shows 
> voiced and opped users at a time, the clients programmers will have it 
> in mind and re-code their clients so this new feature will be parsed 
> properly.
There is very little point in doing this. Furthermore, we do not make changes
just to force the client developers to change things. If you want it fixed in
particular clients, if they are open source, the best thing to do would be to
submit the coders a patch, and unless it breaks something else they will likely
include it in their client. However, changing features like this is usually bad
if it breaks the client<->server protocol. It would be much better to consider
some sort of CAPAB command for clients that indicates they support a feature
like that before it is sent. There is a list run by dalnet that discusses such
client<->server features(e-mail epiphani at dal.net IIRC and he can put you on the
proto-desc list). Such discussions do not belong on server development lists at
this stage.
> 
>   We'd like this feature to be disscused and implemented (if found 
> usefull) in this list, to be implemented in Undernet too.
+ov is quite useless, but under pressure from efnet ircd-hybrid, after dropping
it, now allows +ov only, but no other combinations like +oh, +hv etc... I don't
see any point in giving this to clients, when many cannot display it anyway, and
it is (usually) somewhat irrelevant information.
> 
>   Bests Regards.
> 
> 
>