Watch System

The bulk of this text was taken from another source and is credited to Sandaran.

The /watch system is designed to replace the current notify system, whereby you are alerted when a user in your notify list is on IRC. The /watch system is currently supported on few servers, however it is much more useful than standard Notify.

The /watch system will not replace /notify for some time (i.e. a few years), all the major IRC clients will need to support /watch before notify is no longer used and even then it will be kept for compatibility with older clients, so don't start panicking yet! :)

The new /watch system helps to do away with the constant sending of notify lists to the server, by holding that list of nicks on the server. This way when a user comes on IRC the server can tell you the *instant* they are on IRC, and only has to do this once. With /notify your client sends the list of nicks every so many seconds and so it's not instant, and has to constantly ask the server if they are on.

Also because of the way /watch works, it's also possible to tell the time that the user logged onto IRC and send it to you along with their host mask (i.e. user@host.com), which means you can tell if they are legitimately using that nick or not and it saves you having to /whois them every time (again

saving more bandwidth).

You can have Vortec use the WATCH list instead of NOTIFY when supported by the server by enabling the feature from the Notify List in Client Setup.

Following are a list of commands for the /watch system:

Format: /watch <+|->[nick] <+|->[nick] <+|->[nick]

Example: /watch +somenick +anothernick -thisnick

/watch on it's own is the same as /watch l.

/watch +nick - adds a nick to your /watch list (note that there is no space

between the + sign and the nick.

/watch -nick - removes a person from your /watch list (again, there's no

space between the - sign and the nick)

/watch l - (lowercase L not 1) lists everyone in your /watch list who is

on IRC at that moment.

/watch L - lists everyone in your /watch list, whether they are on IRC or not.

/watch s or S - tells you how many people you have in your /watch list, a list

of those nicks and how many people have you in their /watch list.

/watch c or C - Clears your /watch list (doesn't send you any notification).

For more detailed information on /watch for use in scripting see the watch-s.txt file which you download from my PILs page (http://homepages.enterprise.net/raktajino/pirch/pils/index.html).

* At the time of writing - 16 Feb 1998, only DALnet (irc.dal.net) uses the /watch system and it is limited to 128 users. If you have more than 128 people in your watch list then you'll need to use /ison (notify) as well.

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