Functionality: Filtering

The filtering functionality of dlFilter is designed for file sharing channels, where most of the messages that appear in the channel are of no relevance to your own activities:

As you can see from the screen-shot above, without filtering the screen fills with garishly coloured messages in under 2 minutes. Messages in this example include:

• Server advertising messages (ads) which tell you how you can get a list of the files that each server is offering
• Server announcements - telling you how to download the same file that someone else has just downloaded.
• Server statistics - ctcp SLOTS messages telling other servers (like search servers) basic statistics of the number of files they have and how busy they are
• Server play messages - ctcp MP3 messages suggesting that users should play a file they just shared
• Trivia game questions, answers and stats
• Other user's triggers - start with either "!" or "@" and used to search for or request particular files

Other messages not in this example include:

• Automated topic updates
• Channel mode changes e.g. automated adjustment of maximum user limit
• Joins / Parts / Quits / Nick changes & Away messages
• Responses to my own file server requests (e.g. sent privately as notices and displayed in active window by mIRC)

If you are looking for files yourself or trying to chat with another user, all but the last of these are simply noise. dlFilter is highly effective at filtering out all these irrelevant messages as you can see from the screen shot below from the exact same channel, which shows the results after almost 2½ hours:

The types of messages filtered can be chosen in the dlFilter Options Dialog. For example, allowing Trivia Bot messages results in the following:

As you can see, everything except the Trivia questions has been filtered.

For more detail see the Filtering Tab on the Options Help page.