Nicklength increase on Undernet

Eenie · Post by **Eenie** » Wed May 12, 2004 3:54 am

I just ran across this article on http://www.irc-junkie.org/ titled, "Nicklength increase on Undernet" by Asmo. He quotes Isomer:

Undernet's interested in changing the maximum length of a nick. Currently it's 9 characters, the options are upping that to 12 or 15 characters. /msg #nicklen with your vote, votes are any number between 9 and 15. We'll use this information to help form our new policy of nick lengths" he asked the users of Undernet today over wallops.

Asmo goes on to say:

We asked Isomer when he might expect such a change might come in effect. "No idea, probably within a month or two." Such a change would require a vote by the admins of the network.

I thought the Forum would be a good place to discuss it as well, since many people do not use wallops. I assume it is all legitimate.

It's news to me!

Eenie

lemuel · Post by **lemuel** » Wed May 12, 2004 5:39 am

Well, my opinion is that whatever changes will be made to the NETWORK ( Undernet ) as long as it would done something good why not we go for it?

/me i can have my full name maybe heheheh

I read what Eenie posted

Homer · Post by **Homer** » Wed May 12, 2004 7:38 am

well, the nicklen 11 is good for everyone(i guess), setting the nicklen more longer will only start trouble.

DUNCAN_ · Post by **DUNCAN_** » Wed May 12, 2004 10:33 am

Increasing nickname lenght would be a bad addition to the Undernet. It was nine chars since the first EFNet ircD and it shouldn't change now. Besides , it will take up more disk space , and probably more bandwith.

ZeroSlasheÂ® · Post by **ZeroSlasheÂ®** » Wed May 12, 2004 10:34 am

i agree with LordChris, i rather prefer 11 then

puterfixer · Post by **puterfixer** » Wed May 12, 2004 10:46 am

11 or 12 characters would be a great improvement. Memory or disk space isn't a problem, for 100 thousand users connected at the same time, 3 extra characters in nickname means up to 300 more kilobytes of memory distributed on all servers where they connect, and that will happen only if all people online have 12-character nicknames at the same time. Same goes for traffic - 3 bytes/nickname won't kill a server.

bogeyman · Post by **bogeyman** » Wed May 12, 2004 1:11 pm

at last i can change my nickname from HvyMetal to HeavyMetal

Isomer · Post by **Isomer** » Wed May 12, 2004 1:43 pm

IRC never really writes anything to disk. If we did, we'd just fall behind far too quickly on netbursts etc. So disk space isn't much of a worry.

Memory is a slight concern, but the amount of memory held by nicks isn't that large compared to the amount of memory used for sendq's and the like.

Nicks are never sent over the network except when you first login (or change nick), we use an internal identifier for server<->server traffic. So bandwidth isn't a big concern.

9 charactor nicks were around when IRC had <100 simultanious connections. Now we average between 100,000 and 200,000 connections, theres a lot more contention for nicks.

Hopefully it'll make it easier to find a nick (there are more to choose from), and there will be less contention for nicks, so your less likely to have some irritated user who wants you nick.

If you think about it we should be increasing nicks proportional to the log of the number of users we have on IRC. So if we had 9 charactor nicks when we had ~100 simultious connections, then in theory we should have nicks of 22.5 charactors today. Noone's suggesting anything so outlandish. I like the idea of 12, some people think 15.

C0rrupt3d · Post by **C0rrupt3d** » Wed May 12, 2004 5:19 pm

well... it will b nice cos there wont be so manny fights for nicks... and will b possible fow a larger variety of nicknames... now that unet has more users it will b a good idea for nicklen 12 i totaly agree

cheers

Eenie · Post by **Eenie** » Wed May 12, 2004 5:32 pm

#nicklen +stin

I guess the voting is over, Isomer??

Eenie

sirAndrew · Post by **sirAndrew** » Wed May 12, 2004 7:03 pm

A bigger nicklenght will put an end to some fights over nicks and users will have a larger variety of nicks to choose from! So my vote is:Yes change the nicklenght to 11!

maxx · Post by **maxx** » Wed May 12, 2004 7:20 pm

i say 10

Undernet's interested in changing the maximum length of a nick. Currently it's 9 characters, the options are upping that to 12 or 15 characters. /msg #nicklen with your vote, votes are any number between 9 and 15. We'll use this information to help form our new policy of nick lengths" he asked the users of Undernet today over wallops.

Not coming as a big surprise, 15 was a rather popular number amongst the messages.

15 .. too much

puterfixer · Post by **puterfixer** » Wed May 12, 2004 7:36 pm

Nah, I bet the channel became public abruptly and the irrelevant messages sent to the channel exceeded the specific feedback they were looking for

Perhaps the webmasters should open a new poll on the site and make it public through periodic announcements (like the ones for classes or events), through setting the topic on major help channels and other ways which will give the poll a decent visibility.

Homer · Post by **Homer** » Sat May 15, 2004 12:00 am

seems that finaly they decided to change the nickname lenght to 12

Thank god

Razvanet · Post by **Razvanet** » Sat May 15, 2004 1:28 am

I have to agree that this was a good decision, even if it dosen't benefit me at the moment, i have a feeling that it will benefit the network itself at some point

Regards,

Nicklength increase on Undernet

Nicklength increase on Undernet

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