I'm of the opinion that we should expect more of people, and they'll rise to the occasion... It's certainly better than assuming they'll fail miserably.
Or worse yet, to deny them the opportunity to prove a pessimistic view wrong. I'm no wiz with CIDR either, but I could grok it well enough to script up an alias to ban taking in an IP range, and let the script translate it to the appropriate closest CIDR notation. In fact, I'd finished making said alias in a spare evening hour or so* (for mirc, people can translate it reasonably to other clients or languages as needs be). People may not be able to understand CIDR notation by casual inspection, but most do understand IP address ranges they'd like to contain in a ban. When we type, we don't have to pause to think about which ASCII or Unicode sequences we need to use to put each letter down -- that's a low level thing, like CIDR notation would be in banning, that we use tools to remove ourselves from it the necessary distance to let us use IRC (and in this case, control whom we fraternize with in a channel). This is the reason why we have computers and coders to make programs remove the drudgework from otherwise menial tasks, to leave ourselves free to think and do other things. Veering back toward the topic, I had tested out the CIDR notation in the slim hope that Kev's guestimate that it might be accepted by ircu... and it doesn't work presently. Christopher Robin / ChrstphrR * Off-topic gripe: the logarithm functions in mirc lack enough precision to have let me finish the alias in about 10-20 minutes. *grumble* At 06:13 AM 5/8/2002 -0700, Diane wrote: > Given that a lot of admins have trouble understanding CIDR notation, >I suspect users would do considerably worse. > >-- >Diane Bruce, http://www.db.net/~db [EMAIL PROTECTED] >--- I'm too lazy to think of a new aphorism.
