IRC Nickname Tracking Script

Being a telecommuter, the closest thing I have to an office is an IRC channel. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is like a chat room minus the emoticons and pedophiles. While normally the office IRC channel is the very embodiment of maturity, there are two silly things about it that have always annoyed me. The first being that everyone gets to pick their own name, and the second being they can change their names at will.

When everyone can pick their own name you end up with a lot of all-lowercase, powerful sounding names for people you think of as Jim and Bob. If everyone has their own terminal on which they're viewing the channel's discourse there's no reason why we can't all see each other referenced by whatever name we're most comfortable calling the person.

Worse yet is the ability for everyone to change their names. Occasionally, and I've no idea what triggers it, everyone will start switching names willy-nilly to new and sometimes each other's names. This is like going to a costume party where everyone keeps switching masks every few minutes -- eventually someone's gonna kiss someone else's girlfriend.

Because I'm cantankerous and have too much time on my hands, I wrote I little script for the excellent Irssi IRC client I use ( http://irssi.org/ ) that mitigates the hassle from both of the bits of silliness mentioned above. Using my script I can issue commands of the form "/call theirnick whatIcallThem" and from then all messages from the person who was using the nickname "theirnick" will now show up as from "whatIcallThem", and it will do so regardless of how many times they change their nickname.

Is it perfect? No. The people in the channel still refer to one another by their nicknames so I still have to decode nick -> human mappings in my head, but at least not so frequently. At any rate, the script is attached. It is known to work with Irssi v0.8.6.

nick-track.pl.gz

Comments

This script has been updated in a recent entry.