WHOWAS history - How long is it kept?

[Anxiety]

I've never dissected all of the files in Unreal but when I took a look at whowas.h and whowas.c and wasn't quite able to figure this out.

Here's my problem: (And keep in mind I don't know a whole lot about Unreal other than the basic setup and installing a few modules (anope, services, etc.)

I run a chat server that sees thousands of unique daily users, it uses the NickServ service in order for people to register their nicknames so they can claim them and login later

If someone doesn't enter their password to IDENTIFY for their registered nick, within 60 seconds their nickname will be force changed to Guest-#####, (the #'s representing randomly generated numbers). This seems to pose a problem for the /whowas command. It appears that there are so many different nicknames constantly being used on the network, that after a few hundred users connect all my /whowas history is cleared. If a user leaves the IRC or pings out and I try to /whowas their nickname, it says "There was no such nickname", even though I KNOW that nickname was in use by somebody not even a few hours before.

So basically I guess to make this question a lot more simple, what I'm asking is, is there any easy way to greatly increase the history of how many nicknames are stored in the WHOWAS history? I didn't see anything that indicated it could be changed in the files but maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. Any help would be appreciated and I hope someone has an answer.

[Syzop]

During ./Config you can alter this value:

Code: Select all

How far back do you want to keep the nickname history?
[2000] ->

This defines the total number of nicks (of everyone combined) that are kept in history.

After changing the value, re-run 'make' (and 'make install' if you use it), and restart the IRCd.