At 03:17 AM 1/22/2004 +0100, you wrote:

Indeed; I was thinking the same. That could easily drain a hub's
bandwidth. Since it's rather clearly defined anyway which commands
will ever need a similar "upgrade", I'd say that it's better in that
case to make those commands generic enough to be upgraded easily.

The hub need not trust the commands, for it's not hurt by them no matter how malicious the intent. It should merely relay them to clients, the responsibility of which to protect themselves becomes ever clearer under this proposal.

Regarding bandwidth, a hub should indeed prevent a user from consuming too much of its upload bandwidth, but it should do this by treating B commands equally. If a client wishes to waste its prescribed allotment on BGBG garbage commands of which the hub has no knowledge, it should be free to do so; this simply means it should not then be able to send searches and chat messages.

-cologic