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ZNC the IRC Bouncer

ZNC is an IRC bouncer. You run it on an 'always on' computer to connect to IRC, then your clients connect to ZNC instead of directly to IRC servers. There are lots of benefits to doing that, such as not missing messages while you're away.

I learned quite a lot about ZNC over the past few days, particularly since the combination of using WeeChat, upgrading the bouncer, and configuring logging all happened at once and conspired to confuse me!

ZNC Chat Buffer and Playback

By default, ZNC will build a chat buffer of messages while you're offline, but only when no clients are connected. In other words, if you have two clients, one of which never gets switched off, then ZNC assumes that I don't want to see the same messages twice, and my second client never gets the chat logs replayed when I reconnects.

I had been using a single client (HexChat) for a long time without any issues. When I set up WeeChat in a tmux session, HexChat was no longer receiving the chat history from when it was disconnected. This happened because WeeChat was already getting the messages, and of course ZNC assumes I'm seeing these - a fair assumption in most cases, I suppose.

So, to fix that I used the commands: -

/msg *status loadmod controlpanel
/msg *controlpanel set AutoClearChanBuffer $me false
/msg *controlpanel set AutoClearQueryBuffer $me false

This could also be done via the web interface (there's a tick box for auto-clear of the channel buffer).

This tells ZNC to hang on to the buffers even when a client has seen the messages.