[IRCServices] Services Suggestion - NickServ

[Mark Hetherington (Eurocom)]

We have a number of users that come from Java clients. As is the nature of
many java based IRC interfaces they have a "default" nickname and use an
incrementing numerical suffix to maintain some form of unique nicknames.  A
majority of users of this service tend to use the default despite a number
of encouragements to choose their own nickname first. It was "interesting"
to see how many people actually joined a chat called TypeYourNameHere...
hehe.

The problem comes when one of these visitors registers the nickname. E.g.
JavaGuest. The next JavaGuest coming in with that name will get forcibly
changed to Guestnnn by Nickserv.

NS now seems to correctly prevent the registration of it's own internal
Guest names and there appears to be an appropriate flag to detect that a
nick is "guested" so working from this base, I see two possible solutions:

1) The current NS supports suspension and forbidding of nicknames. Add a new
state that does not forbid the use of the nickname but forbids registration
of it. This however would be limited in application since each name
generation by the JavaChat program would have to be set to this status
creating a human workload that services is largely designed to remove.

2) Add in support for multiple user defined "guest" nickname types. This
way, anyone whose nick is say JavaChatnnnn could be handled by the same code
which handles services native guest names. Although probably easier as a
configuration file change (as with the native current guest prefix), a
registration mechanism with NS would be preferable. For the purpose of NS
processing it could maybe use the new status value described above but
merely stores a prefix in the database rather than an explicit nickname and
the nick be flagged to be processed as a guest nick type. Maybe a new
command /NS REGISTERGUEST <JavaChatPrefix> <PrefixOwnerEmail>.


Mark.
CTCP Networks.