Greetings. As those of you that watch patches@ are aware, in addition to the bug fixes recently committed to u2.10.11, I have incorporated a new feature intended primarily for use by the Undernet Channel Service. This feature is simply the association of a string of up to 12 characters with a user. This string can only be set by servers and is transmitted during the burst. The intent is that X will set the string when a user logs in, and then subsequently re-login the user when it sees it during the burst, thus making it unnecessary for users to re-login after a net split.
To implement the feature, we first implemented a new user mode, visible only to the server--clients never see this mode. This special mode takes a single argument, the 12-character "account" string, and is only present in NICK messages. We used the mode letter 'r' for this purpose. Again, this is only present in the server<->server protocol, and has no relation to the meaning other networks have given to this mode character. The next step was to implement a new command, "ACCOUNT" (token "AC") for a server, such as channels.undernet.org, to set the account string. The account string may only be set once, and may not be reset, for security reasons. The ACCOUNT command is broadcast to all servers, so that it may be queried and used during the net burst. We have changed /whois to report the account string as well. Various bots may find this useful to verify that a user has logged in to X and to discover their channel service username for the purposes of authentication. We are currently using the numeric 330, but be forewarned: This is subject to change. This numeric is produced as follows: :<server> 330 <origin> <destination> <account> :is logged in as where <origin> is the nickname of the user who issued /whois, <server> is that user's server, <destination> is the nickname of the person the /whois is for, and <account> is the account name of the user. The numeric is composed in this fashion so that bots and scripts can easily extract the account name; I suggest that clients be scripted to display the final argument ("is logged in as") between the <destination> and <account> arguments. A simple /on for ircII-type clients follows: /on ^330 * echo *** $1 $3- $2 An announcement will be posted here if we need to change the numeric used. Also, please note that this feature is only implemented at present in ircu2.10.11, which is currently undergoing beta testing and is not yet stable. Enjoy! -- Kevin L. Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>