4) To maintain some of the binary advantages, I'd suggest going back to the
old FOURCC codes, and have the first letter denote command type. Then BCHA
<from-guid> <text without nick> would be a broadcast chat message, HNIC
<nick> a hub validatenick-type command and CCON <to-guid> <from-guid> be
connecttome. The C type messages would always have to as their first
argument so that the hub could always route them to the correct user even if
it doesn't recognise the command natively (with a setting in the hub which
commands to pass through of course), and parsing is fairly easy as each
command has fixed positions where it can pick up info.

Why not even use only 2 characters (=>26*26 = 676 possibles alpha word). More over, if we are using a GUID instead of nickname, we can even remove some separator because GUID have a constant size. Using this, a private message can be coded (for example)
PMguid1guid2blah blah blah|
which is rather compact and fast to decode.

Eric
DCTC/dchub