Can I hide my idle time ?

haku · Post by **haku** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 8:18 am

Can I hide my idle time ?
what flag it is ?

Dukat · Post by **Dukat** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 3:53 pm

No, you can't, sorry

Although there's this suspicious passage in m_whois.c:

/*
 * Fix /whois to not show idle times of
 * global opers to anyone except another
 * global oper or services.
 * -CodeM/Barubary
 */

I'm not sure what the meaning of this is... Maybe someone should post a feature/bug request at bugs.unrealircd.com?

codemastr · Post by **codemastr** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 4:36 pm

I never quite understood why you would want to hide the idle time.

Post by **Syzop** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 4:45 pm

It's an old comment that no longer applies.
The "feature" was added @ Dec 5 2000 [.102] and was later removed on May 27 2001 [.159] with the comment 'Fixed /whois problem, maybe introduced some others?' [stskeeps].

jewles · Post by **jewles** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 1:30 am

ummmm plus that wouldn't be an ircd thing it would be more of a client side problem... that that it's possible anywho! but yeah codemastr is right, what the hell would you care enought....

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 1:39 am

Could be either, either the server could just not send the idle time (sounds like he wants to hide HIS to OTHERS) or could get the client not to display it in the whois response.

codemastr · Post by **codemastr** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 2:48 am

Yeah, I assume he doesn't want it to be sent out. But why? It's incredibly useful. If I go to /msg someone, and I can see this person is /away and idle for 6 hours, I know not to expect a response. However, if I see they are 30 seconds idle, most likely I will get one. If you really don't want people to know your idle time, every N minutes have your client send a command to reset it.

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:19 am

Most scripts seem to do that, don't know about any clients that do however.

aquanight · Post by **aquanight** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:30 pm

[useless rant]Or someone can make PONG reset idle time

[/useless rant]

But seriously:

Code: Select all

//timerNoIdle 0 1 /ctcp $me PING

Not that hard. Though you'll probably want to actually do the /ctcp in an alias and call that, so that $me is evalutated everytime the timer ticks (so as to keep up with /nick changes).

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 11:12 pm

aquanight wrote:[useless rant]Or someone can make PONG reset idle time [/useless rant]

You'd be surprised how many early ircds do that...

Ive seen around 3 undergoing dev who all did that

Most scripts I know just send a junk PRIVMSG.

aquanight · Post by **aquanight** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 1:23 am

w00t wrote:You'd be surprised how many early ircds do that... Ive seen around 3 undergoing dev who all did that

OMG... PING/PONG is supposed to be used during inactivity... unless they're using the idle time as a ping counter

/

.

w00t wrote:Most scripts I know just send a junk PRIVMSG.

Like the /timer thing I mentioned?

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 1:32 am

The PING\PONG thing is usually overlooked, they just whack a thing in saying "if we recieve something from client, then reset their idle time".

As for your timer thing, unless I am wrong, that is sending a PING to yourself, not a junk PRIVMSG

Both accomplish the same thing, just saying.

Ok, lets all go before this gets really off topic.

aquanight · Post by **aquanight** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 1:39 am

w00t wrote:Ok, lets all go before this gets really off topic.

... and before I have to wip out more offsite smilies...

Nugget · Post by **Nugget** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 4:47 pm

I presume the goal is to obscure the potential situation where all the IRCops on a network are idle and therefore unable to respond to abuse. Channels that don't have complete Op coverage are often subject to this sort of abuse where the lamers wait until all the channel ops go to sleep before flooding the channel. It's reasonable to assume that the same sort of abuse is possible at the network/ircop level.

That said, I'm not in favor of the feature. It'll just encourage people to ask for the ability to hide channel op idle times for the same reason. In my opinion the benefit of public idle times far outweighs the potential for abuse.

w00t · Post by **w00t** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 11:30 pm

Once again, well said nugget.