Subject: Re: bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

From: Amin Bandali <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2020 10:43:23 -0400

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> Phil Hagelberg <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> When using ERC, sometimes you need to /ignore users who are annoying
>> you. Rather than having all ignores persist until you manually un-ignore
>> them, it would be useful to be able to specify an amount of time after
>> which the ignore would expire on its own.
>
> The timeout itself doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to implement,
> but I'm not quite sure whether this would actually be useful.  What's
> the use-case?  I mean, if a user is annoying, then the user will still
> be annoying forever?  Hm...
>

I'd personally use this feature if it were available.  Some people are
not /always/ annoying, just /sometimes/. :-)

>
> Anyway, if this were to be implemented, in what format would the
> timeout be queried for?  Perhaps hours?

Irssi seems to use seconds [0].  But I think minutes would be a nice
compromise between seconds and hours.  Though, ideally, we'd be able to
parse relative time strings like "+1h", "+3d", "+2w", and so on.

[0]: <https://irssi.org/documentation/help/ignore/>

Do you know if Emacs has functions for parsing such time formats outside
Org?  This seems like one of many situations they would come in handy.