/LIST is part of the RFC for IRC. The behavior it is to display is pretty well defined and understood by IRC clients. On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:49 AM, James Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's a thought: I wonder about the scalability of /LIST on todays IRC networks which have 5000+ channels at a time, it's so unreasonably large that it is pretty impractical for a human to find anything in /list, unless they apply some kind of filtering, after they just consumed heavy resources just to download the full listing.
It's about as useful for legitimate uses as a flat '/who 0'.... Imagine if usenet had had a flat hierarchy like this. Limiting /LIST to channels with 2+ members, doesn't filter all that much, and limiting to larger channels perhaps makes /LIST even more useless, since the person may be looking for a channel that happens to have 9 members, instead of the 10 you might pick for /LIST filtering.
Perhaps the LIST command should go away entirely and be replaced with a notice to check some URL for a HTTP-based search service.
(Not a HTTP port opened by ircd, but a standalone module -- some service the server admin would be expected or anticipated to run as a separate process, that would have only read-only access to online IRCD data structures.)
Or with some sort of category-based listing system. Where /LIST contents are approved by humans, so they meet some sort of basic standard.
The average person isn't going to figure out /LIST advanced syntax, they'll try (the hard way) to find anything useful in there.
So I would think it better to take away the inferior tool entirely and provide a robust complete and superior replacement mechanism for accomplishing the goal of finding a channel.
Possibly have /LIST show a _small_ number of highly popular channels that had to go through an extensive application process and be human-approved. _And_ a pointer to a web site for more detailed searches of channels currently online.
Oh, and +p channels wouldn't be searchable in that manner.
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Kobi Shmueli <kobi@dal.net> wrote:
Adam Koeller wrote: They're not exactly the same but perhaps it's time to have cmode +p hide the channel completely from /list again (but still showing the channel on /whois). This will help channels who don't appreciate the random spambots that use /list to find them.
-- -J _______________________________________________ DALnet-src mailing list DALnet-src@lists.dal.net https://lists.dal.net/mailman/listinfo/dalnet-src