[IRCServices] IdleServ, channel keys, and more

[Andrew Church]

Summing up a few issues:

>Quite honestly I've been watching this argument fly around the mailing list
>for so long now that I personally am sick of it.
>
>Andy, I know you think you have valid reasons for not implementing this
>choice, but even I, with my limited intelligence can see that you're
>flogging a dead horse. Why not give people what they want?

     Because I don't want to.  As others have correctly pointed out,
Services is something I do in my spare time because I enjoy it; while I'm
not one to upset people out of spite, neither do I intend to use my
personal time on things I don't like.  I'm sure the people who want an
IdleServ or similar feature have, to their minds, excellent reasons for it.
However, none of those reasons has convinced _me_ of its usefulness, and
I am also not interested in writing it for its own sake; therefore, my
answer is "no".  It's that simple.

     Or did you want to hire me to write it?  If you pay, I'll write
IdleServ and anything else you want.

>It can't slow down Services too greatly as a server such as GamSurge
>A.K.A. GamesNet who uses SRVX has ChanServ in their 30,000+ Channels with
>obviously more users than that. They seem to respond perfectly fine 90-95%
>of the time. Perhaps SRVX has developed a good method? They mustn't ignore
>channel text as srvx has channel triggers?

     One, 90-95% isn't good enough for me.  Two, they probably have a
high-powered server for running Services, but not everyone has such a
server--my own homepage, for example, is served off a 166MHz Pentium, and
the network I originally developed Services for used a 486 for both
Services and the ircd.

>Hello.. I think this is a solution... services must
>check if the user know the channel key. So if someone
>is the *first* user who wants to join a channel with
>mlock +k he must type a command first like this: /cs
>keyjoin #chan channel key ... If someone try to join a
>channel without typing this command ChanServ will
>kick and ban him..

     This is an interesting thought, but the same thing should be able to
be accomplished with ChanServ access lists and SET RESTRICTED.

>1) I think its not right to ignore an email even if
>the answer exists on the search box:-p

     In general, I don't ignore messages just out of spite.  I do tend to
ignore them if (1) the answer is in the FAQ, (2) the sender refuses to
listen to what I've already said, or (3) the message isn't readable at all,
e.g. HTML or multipart mail (Craig McLure, check your mailreader settings--
some of your messages are going out as multipart base64, which my
mailreader doesn't grok).  Again, for something I'm doing on my free time,
I think that's perfectly reasonable.

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at achurch.org
    http://achurch.org/