[zwdr]

>If you're using a bouncer, it's trivial to set it up to change your nickname when you're not there.

This is a terrible way to communicate your absence. It's spammy, potentially confusing and, worst of all, imitates a built in functionality of IRC. The _only_ correct way to set an away status is IRCs builtin `away` message.

[pavel_lishin]

Where's that quote from? fwiw, I 100% disagree with it. Setting an away status is fine, but if I join a channel, it's not at all trivial for me to see who is away and who isn't (although, this may just be the way I have my client set up.)

[zwdr]

What quote? And yes, in my opinion some IRC clients have suboptimal defaults or missing support for this. It's a shame, but changing your nick to emulate a built in IRC command is in no way a solution. Away is standard, and every client should support it. In the end it's a question of the channels rules, but spamming nick-changes is annoying-- especially because people use different formats and simple filtering won't catch all cases. In addition it also breaks queries and might change your identity from a trusted nick to one that could be... everyone.

You're advocating using a hacky workaround that stems from client-side UI issues, instead of using a well-defined built in message. This just seems wrong to me, in every way.

[pavel_lishin]

Oh, i'm sorry, I thought your response also started with a >; I thought you were quoting something. My mistake.

And I agree that nickchanges can be annoying; I guess I've never been in a channel big enough where it was a significant issue.

And yeah, it's hacky - but given that IRC is fairly bare-bones, I think it's a good human-readable compromise. You can register your afk nickname as well, and notifications work just as well if you configure your client/bouncer to highlight them both (which I think most do by default anyway.)

[jsnell]

I'm really not sure whether you're pulling some kind of a passive-aggressive "I'm being misquoted so badly that I refuse to even acknowledge it's a quote" routine, someone has edited their message, or you're genuinely not seeing it. At least currently the text after the ">" is a direct quote from the message it was a reply to (i.e. your initial message). It also seems pretty representative. If you disagree with that text 100%, it seems that you perhaps intended to write something else originally.

[Shish2k]

> this may just be the way I have my client set up

Two explanations are either yes, your client is configured to show active and away people the same; or other people aren't using the 'away' feature, so they show up as active 24/7. In the former case, fix your settings; in the latter case, it is other people who need encouragement to change - but encorage them to make use of the built-in away feature, don't encourage them to change their nicks :)