Notify lists

Notify lists Tracking users on IRC

The notify list is a means of keeping track of users on IRC.
Once connected to an IRC server, you can tell KVIrc to check periodically if your friends are online.
This is basically achieved by setting a property in the registered users database entry.
The property is called notify, and you have to set it to the nickname that you want to look for.
So for example, assume to register a friend of yours like Szymon:

reguser.add Szymon reguser.addmask Szymon Pragma!*@*.it
And then want it in the notify list; nothing easier, just set hist notify property to the nickname that you want him to be looked for:
reguser.setproperty Szymon notify Pragma
In this way, once in a while, KVIrc will send to the server an ISON message with the nickname Pragma. If Szymon is online, you will be notified with a message: Pragma [someuser@somehost.it] is on IRC. If Szymon uses often [Pragma] as his secondary nickname, you can do the following:
reguser.addmask Szymon [Pragma]*@*.it reguser.setproperty Szymon notify Pragma [Pragma]

KVIrc will then look for both nicknames getting online.
KVIrc supports three notify lists management methods:
The stupid ISON method, the intelligent ISON method and the WATCH method.
The stupid ISON method will assume that Szymon is online if any user with nickname Pragma (or [Pragma] in the second example) gets online; this means that also Pragma!someuser@somehost.com will be assumed to be Szymon and will be shown in the notify list.
This might be a false assumption (since somehost.com does not even match *.it), but it is the best result that the stupid ISON method can achieve.
The intelligent ISON method will also check the Pragma's username and hostname and match it in the registered masks; so in the example above, you will be notified if any user that matches Pragma!*@*.it gets online; (but you will not be notified if (for example) Pragma!someuser@somehost.com gets online).
So what's the point in including a stupid method? :) Well... the intelligent method eats some of your IRC bandwidth; it has to send USERHOST messages for every group of 5 users in the notify list. If you have a lot of users in the notify list, it might become slow and eventually cause a client to server flood.
So finally, the intelligent method is the default. If you have flood problems, or if you think that the notify list is quite slow, try the stupid method: it is not that bad after all.
The third notify list management method is the WATCH method.
It uses a totally different (and better) approach to the notify lists management, and can be used only on the networks that support the WATCH notify method (DALnet, WebNet, etc.).
KVIrc will attempt to guess if the server you're currently using supports the WATCH command and eventually use this last method.
The WATCH method uses the notify property to get the nicknames that have to be sent to the server in the /WATCH commands.

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