19:08:30 -!- is is now known as as Posted Mon, 08 Aug 2005

My IRC nick-highlighting is such so that today, all messages directed toward a new person named imako on #ubuntu triggered my attention. While this is easy to fix, it made me consider how frustrating IRC with nick-highlighting must be if you have a nick that is also a common word in a language you communicate in.

I spent a few moments on Freenode today with nicks including the, and, is, it, to, an, as and a.

I was surprised that everyone of those nicks was registered with the nick server. I was not surprised that all were available at the time I tried and that all but the and and had been untouched for the better part of the year.

Let's face it, if your nick was it, you wouldn't enjoy IRC very much either.

Permalink | reflections | View/Add Comments: 7

Responses to This Post

I have dreamed for ages about an irc client with per-channel nick highlighting, and highlights based on regular expressions.

Most UIs are getting simpler rather than more complex, so I don't expect my wish to come true anytime soon.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey
Posted by Jeff Bailey at Wed Aug 10 14:04:29 2005
19:39 -!- Irssi: as is now known as is

Although my nickname is ema, 'email' isn't highlighted here, so I can enjoy IRC quite like everyone else. :)
Posted by ema at Wed Aug 10 14:04:44 2005
Mine is simply 'sunny' ... thus I really hate it when people talk about things like the weather ... :)
Posted by Sunny Dubey at Wed Aug 10 14:17:10 2005
Normally the client should not highlight you when the char before or after is alpha-numerical. Otherwise it would IMHO be a bug in the client you use.
Posted by Philipp Kern at Wed Aug 10 19:19:13 2005
iMako? sounds like your apple alter-ego ;-)
Posted by Øivind Hoel at Wed Aug 10 20:59:46 2005
Don't say that word! ;)
Posted by A knight who, until recently, said NI at Thu Aug 11 03:36:37 2005
I'm using a little plugin script that sounds an alert when my name (or any other regexp) gets mentioned in Xchat. It's handy for the way I use IRC. But I did have to modify it to only look for "matt" as a word-initial string after an extended conversation between two colleagues about the distinction between a "case" and a "matter".
Posted by Matt Norwood at Thu Aug 11 09:14:12 2005

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