Alis

From ircnet #help
Jump to: navigation, search

What is 'Alis'?

Alis (Advanced List Service) is the service IRCnet uses to allow you to search for channels. It is a replacement for the /LIST IRC command.

See the FAQ for information on LIST and why Alis is used instead.

Quickstart

(Trillian and Gaim users should take special care that they read the How does 'alis' work? -section below too.)

Lists all channels with the channelname containing "help":

/SQUERY ALIS LIST *help* 

Lists all channels with a minimum of 10 users and the word "help" in the topic:

/SQUERY ALIS LIST * -min 10 -topic help 

See also FAQ for links to web-based channel listings.

How does 'alis' work?

/SQUERY ALIS command arguments

On some IRC clients, SQUERY does not work that easilly by default, then you have to use (notice the colon):

/SQUERY ALIS :command arguments

or even (known to work in Trillian and Gaim):

/QUOTE SQUERY ALIS :command arguments

You can get some help on alis with the following command:

/SQUERY ALIS HELP

A particular usefull command is:

/SQUERY ALIS HELP EXAMPLES

For a full list of command arguments for the alis LIST command:

/SQUERY ALIS HELP LIST

Semi-technical notes

Alis honours the secret/private ( s and p) channels, we only get to see the visible ones.

As it is right now it is impossible to list more than the first 60 channels that matches a given search (This is fixed in a more recent beta-version, but it is not used on IRCnet.)

There is also a slight issue with case-sensitivity, you can not match against uppercase text in a topic.

IRCnet uses Alis version 2.4.

Download

You can find the Alis service software at http://aliserv.sourceforge.net/

(You do not need to download anything if you just want to use the alis service to list IRCnet channels for you, the service runs on irc servers to provide the list to users)