Warning: Almost had an infinite loop in nick_get()

[dan@…]

I get the following error when signing into my Twitter account:

<root> FAILED. Returning an insane nick now. Things might break. Good luck,
       and please don't forget to paste the lines up here in #bitlbee on OFTC
       or in a mail to wilmer@gaast.net
<root> Warning: Almost had an infinite loop in nick_get()! This used to be a
       fatal BitlBee bug, but we tried to fix it. This message should *never*
       appear anymore. If it does, please *do* send us a bug report! Please
       send all the following lines in your report:
<root> Trying to get a sane nick for handle StephenAtHome
<root> Char 0: ¢/-94
<root> Char 1: _/95
<root> Char 2: _/95
<root> Char 3: _/95
<root> Char 4: _/95
<root> Char 5: _/95
<root> Char 6: _/95
<root> Char 7: _/95
<root> Char 8: _/95
<root> Char 9: _/95
<root> Char 10: _/95
<root> Char 11: _/95
<root> Char 12: _/95
<root> Char 13: _/95
<root> Char 14: _/95
<root> Char 15: _/95
<root> Char 16: _/95
<root> Char 17: _/95
<root> Char 18: _/95
<root> Char 19: _/95
<root> Char 20: _/95
<root> Char 21: _/95
<root> Char 22: _/95
<root> Char 23: 
<root> FAILED. Returning an insane nick now. Things might break. Good luck,
       and please don't forget to paste the lines up here in #bitlbee on OFTC
       or in a mail to wilmer@gaast.net

I get about 10,000 lines of this before it lets me do anything useful in &bitlbee

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

Did you set your nick_format setting to anything special?

[anonymous]

Yeah, I had it set to %full_name@%account which I gather is not what it should be. I set nick_source instead, and it works fine. As a humble suggestion: it would be nice to clarify between nick_format and nick_source more clearly, as well as not spitting out tens of thousands of lines of garbage if one is set incorrectly :)

Great work, I've been loving BitlBee for over a year now!

[wilmer]

Yes, @ is not a valid character for a nickname. Putting invalid chars in that variable will cause this error, that's definitely a bug. :-/

nick_source is just a bw compatibility setting, nick_format should be used from 3.0+. I should really make nick_source a hidden setting, I'm surprised that I didn't already..

[dx]

Checked in current versions, this isn't an issue anymore (that whole kind of debug message has been nuked some time ago)