The first in my series celebrating my dead mIRC scripting past.

I just recently found out that my old mIRC scripting website had died. For about two years when I first really got into computers, I was all about scripting as a hobby. By the time I stopped, I was recognized as one of the best in the world, under the name SilverSwd/SilverSword. I won contests, I reviewed scripts for the dead tradition that is paiRC (which is why, when Jux first started, I was still using silversword@pairc.com as my email address), and a thousand other things. But then I stopped. I lost interest.

With my old scripting website gone, along with paiRC, there is no real archive of my accomplishments. So, I decided to write these features, which will contain shots of my two most famous scripts, ServerCheck and SilverMail, which both enjoyed thousands of downloads in their time. Originally, I was going to do all of this in one large feature, but it became clear to me that that would be cumbersome. I’m also going to do a feature on odds and ends, including my ongoing Mercury project, which was trying to combine all of the personal scripts I used into one “full” script for release.

All of these screenshots were used on my old website, and I have not taken any new ones. I don’t think new ones would capture the “spirit” quite as well as the originals could.

I will not be offering these scripts for download. They are all five years old now, at best, and it’s not fair to have them be judged by what they are now. Let them only be judged by what they were.

ServerCheck
By far, the most popular of my addon scripts, and also the first one I ever released to a wide audience. All of the screenshots I have are from either the beta version of ServerCheck 1.3, or the wide release of ServerCheck 1.21, the most famous version.

The purpose of ServerCheck was to compare the latency of other servers to the one you were on. It was the first script ever written to do this, although I was quickly ripped off by at least one of the giant scripting consortiums. While a standard “ping” could tell you the lag between yourself and one other person, ServerCheck could tell you how well your current sever was connected to the network. This would give you a good idea of the network status of your server. Quite useful, really, because it’s always hard to tell if the lag between you and the rest of the chatroom is your fault or theirs. Let’s get on to the screenshots.

This is the main window of ServerCheck 1.3. The top bar shows you which server is currently being pinged. This is the first time that that SC 1.3 has tried to ping the server “Brussels.Be.Eu.Undernet.org”; otherwise, the Avg Ping box would contain the averaged ping time of all the other times you’d pinged said server. The “Progress” box says that you have completed a scan of 4 out of 30 servers in your list, Brussels being the fifth.

Below the top line of boxes, you see a large white box with some server names in it. These are the completed servers, and it shows the time it took for them to reply. So far, the worst ping is 2 seconds, so the user is on a pretty good server.

On the right side, there is a column of buttons topped by two progress bars. The purple progress bar shows how close the overall scan is to being complete. The green bar below it shows how long you’ve been waiting for the current server to reply. The progress bar is calibrated to the timeout time specified in the options. Currently, SC has been waiting for Brussels to reply for 41 seconds (that’s bad!), and it’s going to time the server out at 60 seconds.

Next, let’s look at what other windows the buttons on the right side will open.

This is a picture of ServerCheck’s server list editor, taken in the horrible windows colors I used at the time. There are two text boxes. The larger one, on the left, shows the current loaded list of servers. The smaller one, on the right, shows all the server lists you have. Currently, the “Undernet” server list is loaded. If you click the Add button, you can add a server to the current list. The remove button removes one. And, if you click the “Fill” button, ServerCheck automatically fills the current list with all of the servers currently connected to the one you’re on.

On the right side, clicking “Gather Lists” creates lists by using the mIRC server list. This is how the right text box was filled with random stuff like AMnet. “Load List” loads the currently selected list in the right text box, and turns it into the current list. “Save Current List” saves the servers in the left text box as a list, either a new one or overwriting an old. Finally, “Delete List” deletes the entire selected list.

This is the ServerCheck Options dialog, also in my horrible windows colors. I’m just going to go down the line, explaining each option. This window is from ServerCheck 1.21, so I’ll explain the few differences in the ServerCheck 1.3 options dialog that you can’t see.

View missing servers will list servers that don’t reply in the list box in the main dialog. By default, servers that time out are ignored.

Check again after automates server check. The number entered is in minutes (actually, ServerCheck 1.3 finally labeled it as such). By using this option, ServerCheck will automatically start a new scan two minutes after the last one completes. This means that you can keep constant tabs on your server’s connection.

Echo final result will echo the final, average ping of all servers that ServerCheck returns to your current chat window. This let’s you run ServerCheck in the background, and is very useful with the check again option.

Show progress bar . ServerCheck 1.21 only had the first progress bar, so there’s only one box. ServerCheck 1.3 added the green timeout bar, and this option was split into two, one check box for each bar.

Timeout enables the timeout feature, and is set in minutes. Without this option enabled, ServerCheck will wait indefinitely for a server to reply.

Log pings keeps a record of all the pings returned by a server. The “average” and “graph” functions don’t work without it.

Another shot of SC’s 1.3 dialog, this one in my old windows colors. This shows what it looks like when a scan is a bit closer to complete, with the timeout bar turned off.

This is the ping graphing function of ServerCheck. The recorded pings returned by the selected server, in this case washington.dc.us.undernet.org, graphed using the current “timeout” time setting as the Y axis. Washington was always one of the fastest servers, the one I used all the time, and the reason why is reflected in this graph quite well.

The next feature will focus on SilverMail 1.0 and 1.1.