Before I even explain what I mean, I can say that I mean like what mIRC has, so mIRC users will probably already know what I mean.
To those not familiar with the intended meaning, the reason that mIRC does so much better than so many other windows clients isn't because it looks prettier or is easier (both of those other clients can do better.) Other clients by now probably offer the scripting feature that mIRC has, but it did it first for windows so far as I know, and possibly best of them all. What I mean by the scripting is that mIRC will let you write little scripts that could do everything from saying "Hello Josh, how are you today?" when the user starts it to complex tasks such as managing a channel (kicking spammers/flooders automatically, etc.) Of course, the channel managing can be done by hub bots, but that's only one of the more complex things, there is a full range of things in between that are entirely client side. Everything from being able to create your own commands to not showing certain text in the main chat but moving it automatically to a window of your choice (REALLY handy with join/parts to move them to a seperate small window so you can see them but not be flooded by them.) One of my favorite scripts was one that automatically kept my nickname the same after server splits and identified to the local nickname service on request automatically so I didn't have to watch it. I don't know exactly what could be done with DC++ in this area without know just what the client can do, so I just have to say that as long as the scripts could give the user control over just about everything like the way mIRC does, the possibilities are endless and some use would be found for such a thing for certain.
Probably someone wishes to argue that such a thing can be easily abused. Well, abuse is possible, but, just look to IRC for the answer to that. Overall it's not really abused too badly even though there are all sorts of "kiddie" scripts out there. I also believe DC is a little less vulnerable to some of the worst things we've had to put up with on IRC. Anyway, the things that were abused generally could be easily enough scripted into the ops' scripts to be banned on, so people couldn't keep doing them. Also, I should point out that most of the worst that has been done in mIRC through scripts has been done in DC++ through other means, more often than not a modified client. Also, many are being done by hub ops and/or owners themselves! For example, one of the most annoying things was when people flooded channels with annoying pointless ascii art (sorry to any of the ops of any hub I hang out in who see this, but, quite frankly, it's just annoying to most of us and it only adds to bandwidth usage for the hub meaninglessly.) So even with scripts, such things wouldn't be too much more likely than they already unfortunately are.
I'd kill for client scripts...
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