UnrealIRCd Forums

This may or may not be a bug, so please feel free to flame away if I'm off the mark. If a user has a number as the first character of their name Unreal denies the login or denies the nick change.

My question is 3 fold:

1) Is this a bug or a feature?

2) Is there a reason for this?

3) Is there a way to circumvent this?

I've got about 400 users in my userbase that would likely be using IRC and their usernames begin with a number. Just saying "Don't use a number" won't cut it.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

-T

1) Is this a bug or a feature?

It's following RFC1459 which says:
<nick> ::= <letter> { <letter> | <number> | <special> }

We can't trust clients to work if theres nicknames which are solely numbers.

2) Is there a reason for this?

See above

3) Is there a way to circumvent this?

There's some places in the IRC protocol/server-to-server protocol which might take damage from having numbers instead. We also need to disallow this for future protocol changes where we give each online user a number/unique ID to compress the server-to-server data further. I wouldn't consider to try and circumvent it. Ask them to do something like [number or ^number.

Oh, and, Don't use a number.

(I assume I'm covered now since you said "Just").

-Stskeeps

Thanks for the help! Good idea on appending some other character on to their nick... now I just have to figure out some way to make that happen automatically.

I knew I was setting myself up for snarky quip at some point.

-T

wich language are you scripting it in?

I'm coding in ASP.

I'm actually combining a Java client with my current ASP based log in system. As soon as a user logs in to the site, a window will pop up with the Java client and open a main lobby channel.

I've already built the work around - I just surrounded the normal nickname with square brackets during the login. A bit of a hack, but considering the circumstances, it'll do.

-C