[Erc-discuss] Automatically disabling ERC flood control for BitlBee servers

[William Gardella]

Hello all,

wilmer, the author of BitlBee ( http://bitlbee.org/ ), the notorious
instant messaging to IRC gateway, is attempting to get a good
cross-section of IRC clients to support automatically disabling their
rate limiting features when connected to a BitlBee server.  Rate
limiting is counterproductive when used with BitlBee; it gets in the way
of BitlBee's paste buffering feature, which is used to convert a series
of lines entered in rapid succession (e.g. a paste into the IRC client)
into a single, multi-line instant message at the other end.  Flood
control makes the pasted text dribble in over several seconds, instead
of cooperating nicely with BitlBee's paste buffer.

For the moment, the kludge I use in ERC for BitlBee is to disable flood
control before attempting to send multiple lines yanked from another
buffer, or toggling flood control off with a buffer local variable.
However, wilmer would like to see clients support ISUPPORT FLOOD
information from the server, so that clients connected to bitlbee
automatically know that they should disable their rate limiting.  See
http://bugs.irssi.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=796 for the
implementation he's trying to get the irssi people to use:

> BitlBee doesn't care about message floods at all  
> and in fact it's good if the IRC client does *not* rate limit 
> pastes so they can be converted to multiline messages on the  
> IM side. ATM it takes some effort to configure one's          
> well-behaved IRC client to be willing to flood BitlBee.       
>                                                                   
> To make this easier, I added a little piece of info to        
> BitlBee's 005:                                                
>
> :localhost 005 wilmer ... FLOOD=0/9999 :are supported by this 
> server                                                        
>
> The format is FLOOD=cmd_queue_speed/max_cmds_at_once. One     
> would maybe consider this rather biased against irssi's       
> implementation of rate limiting but it seems generic to me.

How easy would this be to implement in ERC?  Where would one start?

Best,

-- 
William Gardella
J.D. Candidate
Class of 2011, University of Pittsburgh School of Law