There are two problems with IRC applets. The first is that the IRC applet code has to live on the same server that it's connecting to, so we can't just ship an IRC Java applet. The second is that every applet I've seen lets you just change your name, and as there's no real authorization going on IRC-side, I can just log in with any old client and be who I want to be regardless. Not to mention the problem with different naming rules...
The chat ban goes way back to the mid '90s, when the most popular chat scripts of the day were Perl/CGI based, and completely dynamic. They were based around either streaming data to the client, or refreshing a page using a meta tag. In either case, that's a heck of a lot of scripts being called relatively frequently.
I've written my fair share of chat scripts. They're all based around a static HTML page that refreshes every 8 seconds or so... very light on the server. If not for the general global ban, something like that could easily be integrated in our downloadables.
(It's interesting that hosts permit shoutboxes, which basically ARE chat scripts...)
The multiple login detector is pretty cool. I wrote something like that for TrekBBS. Unfortunately, it's also really rather special-case, so it's not likely to be a stock feature.
The character encoding issues occur because Threads kills all HTML entities when HTML posting is disabled, regardless of if they're "safe" or not, using the htmlspecialchars() function.
Classic doesn't have such a builtin function to use, so when HTML is disabled, we only kill certain things. We'll probably end up taking this approach in the new product as well.
Image dimensions will not be hard-coded in the templates, if they're even included at all.
Graemlin ordering is in the database, but there isn't a UI planned to allow for the order to be edited, at least in the 1.0 release.
Could you explain the space problem, please? I don't understand.
