Hi all, As this is my first mail to this list a quick introduction; I'm one of the guys coding stuff for QuakeNet, I've worked on some aspects of our current pl18 patch and I'm involved in producing our next patch (which will be against 2.10.11).
One problem that occurs from time to time on QuakeNet is very large channels which form around specific events, for example CPL events where there are channels with bots doing commentary on games etc. The problem with these very large channels is the part/join spam can generate a lot of traffic and often ends up SendQ'ing users who don't have fast connections. A possible solution to this problem would be a "high traffic" channel mode which inhibits the sending of parts/joins to most clients. This would work something like this: * New channel mode (let's call it +h for the sake of argument) can only be active in +m channels. Thus only +v and +o users will actually be able to say anything. * Channel ops can see all channel users as normal. All other users can only see opped users, voiced users and themselves. JOINs and PARTs and NICKs for -ov clients are only sent to opped users. * If a normal user is opped/voiced then a JOIN is broadcast to all clients before the MODE. If they are then deopped/voiced then a PART is sent afterwards (or even instead of the MODE). * When a user is opped they can either be forced off the channel and back on, or a new NAMES can be sent (what do clients do if you do that to them?) or a sequence of JOIN messages can be sent to show them the "new" users. * When a user is deopped, either they can be forced off and on again or a whole load of PARTs can be sent. * Adding or removing the channel mode itself is problematic but will probably involve a variation of the above techniques. Setting or clearing the mode will probably have some restrictions based on channel size. The problem with the JOIN/PART vs. NAMES thing is that there will often be literally thousands of nicks involved so NAMES is much more compact, however forcing PART/JOIN or just broadcasting a new NAMES and expecting the client to cope is "just a bit" hackish ;). So, two questions: (a) Has anyone done this before, if so how did you do it and what happened? (b) What do you think of the above idea? Any thoughts appreciated. Cheers splidge
