I’m from the colloquy team and I was forwarded this link by Shyam

It’s not really so much that Colloquy is displaying that on purpose, but that it’s displaying that via Growl or its own internal notification to let you know that there is such a notice. MemoServ is not that popular and well, nobody’s ever told us about this particular issue either. So it was the perfect storm of nobody doing anything (until now) about this Please let us know about these issues! File bugs in trac or just email us at support@colloquy.info.

On the other hand, I can’t help but agree with some of you that Colloquy does hide some things that are irritating, and we’re hoping to address some of those issues now and in the future (e.g. some notices/error messages are being handled now that weren’t for years on end). Some things is really because the main dev is not comfortable changing names (like “chat room” for “channel”) because Colloquy supports more than one protocol, but we don’t really have a good reason for the rest, hah. Some day. Besides, it’s an open source project

Anyway, Dan does hit the spot with his explanation of how services work with regard to IRC. We still have to address individual NickServ issues with identification per network/services packages, let alone memos and similar.

I hope that clears up some things. Thanks for listening

cheers,
jane

I do find it interesting how many people are blaming IRC and memoserv for the problem when I would bet you all use colloquy. Good reminder that when people have bad experiences they tend to paint things with a much wider brush than when it’s positive (even when they should know better ).

It’d be interesting if you could disable your memoserv inbox, but I think Colloquy could pop up a much more helpful memo inbox, skitched out here: http://mbilf.com/2008/10/msmail/

- Boriss

I used Colloquy for a while, and this sort of thing is in fact exactly why I stopped using it. I’ve been using IRC pretty much since I first had an Internet connection, and I was still regularly lost by Colloquy’s attempts to hide any of the “complicated” internals of IRC (like messages from Services?!) from me. IRC just doesn’t work like that.

Many servers use similar services but they may have slightly different feature sets, be slightly different revisions of the same services, or may even have different sets of services altogether. Furthermore with most services you can rename or deactivate any of the services. Many servers activate /ns, /nickserv, /cs, /chanserv, /ms, and /memoserv shortcut commands while others require you to /msg the services.

Example. Anope is the most popular services, but there are a few others too. GameSurge uses the most unusual services set I’ve seen, where there is no NickServ and instead uses “AuthServ”, and user accounts are NOT tied to individual nicks but to a unique AuthServ username. So you can authenticate using a user name NOT tied to your nick to get your services benefits.

If an IRC client tries to integrate with Anope NickServ it is going to totally not work on GameSurge (GameSurge bounces back an error telling you to use AuthServ instead). I’m guessing Colloquy has something like this.

I’m guessing Colloquy sees the MemoServ notice when you log on to NickServ informing you of your memo, but of course there is no guarantee that /msg MemoServ read 1 will work. Maybe someone somewhere has mad a MemoServ with a web interface for managing memos and it only notifies you about them over IRC, and has no commands itself. Colloquy’s devs may have chose to only integrate with MemoServ as far as parsing messages it sends that Colloquy understands.

TLDR version: IRC protocol does not extend to services, where, AFAIK, there is no standard and thus no easy way to integrate them with chat clients.

Colloquy’s attempt to be user friendly is simply half-assed. Thanks for your comment!