Allow nick changes

[wilmer]

Ever since the first version BitlBee didn't allow the user to change his/her nickname. This is mainly because the nickname is closely tied to the account files, and we don't want to get into messy situations with them.

It would be nice to relax this restriction a bit though.

[admin]

Putting this for 1.0 for now, but I might change my mind. :-)

[wilmer]

Okay, I did. :-)

[wilmer]

Maybe it could be nice to make it possible, at least, to supply an extra nickname argument to the identify command, so you can load settings from a different account (if you got the password for it, of course).

The current situation is not very convenient for people who use public servers and change their nick for some reason. Although your nick doesn't matter at all for BitlBee, it's a bit annoying to keep the old nick for only the BitlBee network.

[mbs]

the reason not being able to change one's nick is annoying is that some irc clients don't offer automated connections with arbitrary nicknames...

yet, they do all seem to support /nick.

[timing]

At least changing nicks BEFORE identifying or registering should be allowed. I once had to put my new nickname in my irssi config for the bitlbee server.

[Olof 'zibri' Johansson <olof@…>]

I made a simple patch, doing what timing wrote, i.e allowing nick change before identifying. I did minor tests with it seems to be working with irssi. Don't know if I have missed something though. I had problems uploading the patch here in Trac, so I'll just upload it to my server and link to it...

​http://stdlib.se/unidentified_change_nick.diff

[wilmer]

Hm, interesting.

And this could also be used to move one's account from nick to nick by using the drop command to drop the old one, change the nick, and then register the new one.

Very nasty if the connection times out somewhere half way, of course.

In a different branch I've also been thinking a bit about this problem, finding a proper solution is really hard with how the storage system currently works. :-/

The patch seems good, you should just also check if the nick cmd[1] doesn't already exist.

[Olof 'zibri' Johansson <olof@…>]

Heh, didn't realize that implication. Updated the patch, and will upload it here this time. I changed the irc_reply on nick collision somewhat; irssi gave me

02:09:23 -!- Nick This nick is already in use is already in use

and after reading the irc spec, i think that it wanted the new nick name as an argument before the description string.

[wilmer]

Oh yes, most likely it should be like that, thanks for the fix.

For bonus points the "The hand of the deity is upon thee, thy nick may not change" should probably explain now that nick changes are only possible before identify/register or after drop. I'll happily do that myself though.

Thanks!

[wilmer]

Submitted in changeset:devel,590 with some small changes.

I'd close this bug but the problem isn't really solved yet for identified users. Still, this is an improvement for sure. :-)

[wilmer]

Also, see ​http://wiki.bitlbee.org/UiFix

The IRC core rewrite fully fixes this problem.

[wilmer]

Tagging all these bugs now so I can easily find them back when uifix is merged/released.

[wilmer]

I just merged ui-fix into mainline.