Hey there.

I'm currently programming an IRC Client and I have this doubt: how do I add a "Notify List" capability to my program, just like the one you can find in mIRC? I know the "ISON" IRC command can be used to check whether one or more nicknames are online or not - but that would mean I'd have to ISON the server at least once a minute or the list wouldn't be kept up to date.

Isn't there another possibility, like telling the server which nicks you have in the Notify list when you log into the network, and have it drop you a message every time someone comes online? I've been reading through the protocol RFCs and other documents on the internet, but there doesn't seem to be much info for IRC Client programmers out there. :-(

I hope you can help me, thanks in advance.

Don't you recieve a message saying "such and such has quit such and such a channel" from the server? and "such and such has joined such and such a channel. I presume you would first populate the list when you frist join the channel and then when you recieve a /quit or /join message you would add or remove people as necessary.

-Maybe not - I've never looked at the internals of an IRC client.

A notifiy list is supposed to monitor of the user is on the IRC network, not just the channels that you are in. I believe that there is a server command that supports this. Perhaps you should use ethereal to sniff mirc32's communications with your IRC server?

IRC is a standardized protocol. There's a RFC for it out there. As I recall from when I wrote an IRC client, the capability wasn't in the specs, so there might be different versions of the specs.

There are quite a few extra RAW commands used that are not in the RFC (I've not seen a RFC that includes these extended codes, but there could be one). Get yourself your hands on a RAW mIRC script that will tell you what RAW codes are being received/sent to the server.

Then add someone to your notify list and see what happens.

You should end up with the codes you need for notification.

You could look at the source of something like XChat:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/xchat/xchat2/src/commo... (notify.h)
and
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/xchat/xchat2/src/commo... (notify.c)

Thank you all guys. I found something already - there's another IRC command /WATCH (not sure it is part of the protocol or only exists in some servers) which does exactly what I wanted. Anyway I'll try to find info on raw commands, and have a look at those links too. I may find something useful :)

It may exist on no servers. Commands beginning with slashes exist only in IRC clients and are unrelated to the IRC protocol.