On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 01:08:03AM -0500, placket kidney wrote: > I'm also wondering if I can find mention of just the prefix to the > channel name in any RFCs out there (I sort of wonder how NOTICE ever > got the ability to prefix a channel with a mode's symbolic character, > since it seems like a good way to break some unaware irc clients).
I added WALLCHOPS first to 2.10 (following 2.9). The earliest notice that I have left about it in my personal coder-com mail collection is: beta1.overview:* Added new command /WALLCHOPS #channel ..., or /NOTICE @#channel ... which is from March 1997. I obviously, I can't remember anymore why the '@' character was choosen and put there. I am sure it was discussed with others and tested on a few important existing clients back then to see how it 'looked'. mIRC was already one of the most important existing clients - from a list of possibilities (ie, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) this worked best (mIRC would write the notice to the same window than the current channel). Another client that certainly will have been tested was ircii - as that was the client that I used myself, as did a lot of other UNIX users. So, the reason this particular format was chosen was because from a number of possible options, it turned out to work (look) best on most of the popular clients in 1997. I still have an article that I wrote for the users in August 1997 or so, about the release of 2.10.00 (this article appear to not be on the net anymore). The part about @#channel says: There have been done several things to restrict and decrease bandwidth usage: [...] 4) Mass messaging has been restricted: You now can not sent messages too many different targets anymore. This collided with the fairly legal scripts to sent messages to all channel operators, so a new command has been introduced: WALLCHOPS or NOTICE @#channel, which sends a message to all operators of that channel (please change your scripts to use this command instead: it saves a lot of bandwidth). [...] it says nothing about the reason for the choice, or compatibility issues. That's all I have. WALLVOICES was introduced much later (after I left, so after 2001), but no doubt the reason to keep using @#channel as target was to not introduce ANOTHER weird format. Clients were already used to that format, so it was to most certain way to make it work. In order to distinguish it from WALLCHOPS, the text of the message is prefixed with a '+', I guess. I don't know if that is very reliable though: someone with ops can send a text message that starts with a + too. Suppose I want to paste this to all channel ops: +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + WHO GAVE VOICE TO THAT ABUSER?! + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ then it seems that that would unexpectedly look like it was sent to everyone with a voice, and people might respond with WALLVOICES. Okay, far fetched. But still, it's only a hint (that '+') and the more you USE it in your client, the more it can be abused. Fortunately, it would only be possible to be abused by channel ops - so no real harm can be done I suppose. -- Carlo Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Coder-com mailing list Coder-com@undernet.org http://undernet.sbg.org/mailman/listinfo/coder-com
