Options tab 2: Filters
File sharing channels are characterised by a never ending stream of messages that you probably have little or no interest in, including:
- Adverts by file servers' for their lists of files
- Announcements by file servers of what files they have sent to other users
- Statistical messages about the number of files they are serving and how busy they are
- Other people's requests to find or get sent copies of files
- Trivia quiz questions, hints, answers attempts, answers and statistics
- Spam (about things not associated with file sharing activities)
- Joins, Parts, Quits etc.
With all these other messages (or noise), it can be difficult to spot the messages that are for you.
Filtering is a process of analysing a message and discarding it (or displaying it in a separate window) if it meets certain criteria.
By filtering out all the messages from a file sharing that you are not interested in, the messages you are interested in are now easy to see.
Note: Messages created by, or mentioning, users in your mIRC notify list, or which were created by you are always shown. The only exception is if your own nick is in your mIRC notify list and you are filtering Trivia bot messages that you are mentioned in.
The filters tab has a variety of options that control which type of messages are filtered.
Each of these options is described below:
The general filter options cover channel messages that do not relate to user changes.
If this option is checked, When other users type lines beginning with @ or ! in order to find or get a file then it will be filtered out.
File serving bots advertise and announce themselves every few minutes and these can be pretty annoying. Adverts are messages which e.g. tell you how to use them. Announcements are other messages such as those telling you what files have been sent to other users. If this option is set, then both Adverts and Announcements are filtered.
Adverts are also used to populate the Ads window.
Some channels use a bot to continually adjust the maximum number of users allowed in the channel. The purpose of this bot is to prevent IRC denial-of-service attacks where channels are crashed by hackers having hundreds of users join the channel simultaneously.
The purpose of this option is to filter out these (and other) channel mode changes. Unless they are an op, most users are not interested in these anyway.
Control codes are special characters in messages which display text in colours/bold/italic/underlined/reversed.
Whilst these are sometimes used by users, particularly in role playing channels, in the file sharing channels that dlFilter is targeted at, messages containing control codes are almost always sent by a server.
Whilst it is hoped that the other options will work very effectively in filtering unwanted server messages, leaving just chat messages and the responses to your own requests displayed in the channel, sometimes this is not enough and you need a more heavy handed option, a filter-of-last-resort as it were, that you can use when other filters are not sufficient.
This option filters out all messages containing control codes without a specific text filter. These are almost always server messages, but you can never be certain that a user has not manually used colours etc. Then again if you are only visiting a file sharing channel to share files, you may not be bothered about any messages from other users.
Anyway the option is here if you need it.
In some channels a bot regularly sets the channel topic, often to the same text. This option filters out these messages if they annoy.
This option sends the response messages to your own requests to a separate server window.
This functionality was originally implemented so that these responses were not scattered amongst other server messages, but with better filtering it is now easier to see these in the main channel.
However, the functionality exists (for the moment at least), and this option enables it.
This is a VERY powerful filter, which attempts to distinguish messages from servers purely by the being coloured rather than by the words they contain. This is not a great way of filtering because some server messages are not coloured, and occasionally regular users will send coloured messages despite not being a server - and dlFilter does a pretty good job of filtering messages based on content without the need for enabling this option.
If you are still getting server messages being displayed despite having other filtering options enabled then you have three options:
- Add a custom filter to stop them being displayed.
- Report them to the authors so that new filters can be added, or create a Pull Request for the new filters yourself (it's not difficult).
- Turn on this option. This is the Option of Last Resort, so use it cautiously.
Both of these options filter private messages from regular users who are in at least one common channel with you. Two options are provided as you may wish to handle filtered and unfiltered channels differently.
If you are connecting to several servers simultaneously (e.g. separate networks, or several nicks on the same network) this option create separate Ads, Server and Filter windows for each network. If you are running with only one connection, this should make no difference to how dlFilter operates.
If this option is disabled, when the Filter window is hidden it is closed and all existing contents are lost.
With this option enabled, when you hide or close the filter window, it actually stays open but is hidden from the switchbar & treebar.
When you Show the window again, it is added to the switchbar and treebar and is already populated with previously filtered lines.
User events are those relating to users joining or leaving channels etc.
In channels with large numbers of users, the messages displayed when users join or leave a channel can be very distracting.
So why not filter them out?
When users have an away message set, this functionality filters them away.
This option filters out messages telling you that some user you don't really know has been opped or deopped by another user that you don't really know.
When this option is not set, only joins/parts/etc. for regular users are filtered out. Quits etc. by ops / half-ops / voiced users are shown on the basis that you may want to know when a server leaves the channel.
When this option is set, such messages relating to ops, half-ops and voices users are also filtered.