[IRCServices] Services in channel opers

[Ian R. Justman]

Finny Merrill wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:43:56 +0200, Dylan v.d Merwe 
> <dylanvdm at icon.co.za> wrote:
> 
>> The days have long passed when services used to act like bots and sit in
>> channels. It is now against the irc protocol to allow this, therefore it
>> does not happen nor can you set them to do so in the config file.
>>
>> You can force services into a channel using RAW commands but this is 
>> highly
>> discouraged as all sorts of things can go wrong. Leave them where they 
>> are,
>> you'll be just fine.
>>
>> Dylan.
> Whoa, when did it become against the irc protocol to do this? And which
> irc protocol anyway? :p

Best thing I can gather is RFC 2813 section 2.2.2 which reads as follows:

2.2.2 Services

    Each service is distinguished from other services by a service name
    composed of a nickname and a server name.  The nickname has a maximum
    length of nine (9) characters.  See the protocol grammar rules
    (section 3.3.1) for what may and may not be used in a nickname.  The
    server name used to compose the service name is the name of the
    server to which the service is connected.  In addition to this
    service name all servers MUST know the service type.

    Services differ from users by the format of their identifier, but
    more importantly services and users don't have the same type of
    access to the server: services can request part or all of the global
    state information that a server maintains, but have a more restricted
    set of commands available to them (See "IRC Client Protocol" [IRC-
    CLIENT] for details on which) and are not allowed to join channels.
    Finally services are not usually subject to the "Flood control"
    mechanism described in section 5.8.

But then again, Andy does not recognize the IRCnet RFCs (which is what I 
call them since these documents were written by an IRCnet staffer) as being 
official, so...

Though also, I've seen Hybserv's Services' nicks join channels on two 
different Hybrid/Hybserv networks.  I don't entirely see the point of that 
myself.

--Ian R. Justman, Co-Founder and Postmaster, The EsperNet IRC Network.

-----
Ian R. Justman                  ianj at esper.net (Official EsperNet business)
Co-Founder and Postmaster, The EsperNet IRC Network
Server Administrator, chocobo.esper.net "IJ" on IRC

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