Server Help

[Kood]

When planning a design for a chatnet chat client, a missing piece in the protocol is the ability to have a 'buddy list'.

Given polling a list of people with ?find is ugly, and probably get you killed for message flooding anyway, can something similar to IRC's NOTIFY be added?

e.g.
..on connection, you state what people you want...
LOGIN:1:Kood:secret
NOTIFY:Grelminar:Mine GO BOOM:Smong:Will+:Dr Brain:Helicon:NightHawk (delimited here by :'s, but something else may be more suitable)
Then when the server/billing has one of these people go online/offline, you get something like...
ONLINE:Will+
Then 15 days later when he leaves spec :D
OFFLINE:Will+
Any extra info, similar to a /WHOIS in IRC can be done manually with...
SEND:CMD:find Will+
..so no need to add anything more than NOTIFY/ONLINE/OFFLINE... I think.

Ideally, this would be billing-wide, but I think some higher powers may have to be involved for that?

Server-wide is okay?

Thoughts?

[Kood]

[-Smong-]

What if someone has a username the same as a message keyword, like MSG? The first part of NOTIFY should say how many parts there are.

[CypherJF]

Not to majorly bump this, but definately an excellent idea; and missing feature. There should also be a max value of the number's a notify can do at any particular time.
_________________
Performance is often the art of cheating carefully. - James Gosling

[Grelminar]

Sorry, this is a biller feature. The server has no better way of getting this information than polling the biller, and I'm not going to do that.

[Bak]

couldn't it at least work on the local server?