Can people on IRC get notified if I do /whois on them

irc

Do people I use /whois command on see it somehow, or is there a setting that lets them see? Is that possible on any client? If yes, how? I hope it isn't, I don't want people to see me stalking.

Best Answer

According to RFC 2812, section 3.6.2, concerning the WHOIS command:

This command is used to query information about particular user.
The server will answer this command with several numeric messages
indicating different statuses of each user which matches the mask (if
you are entitled to see them).  If no wildcard is present in the
<mask>, any information about that nick which you are allowed to see
is presented.

If the <target> parameter is specified, it sends the query to a
specific server.  It is useful if you want to know how long the user
in question has been idle as only local server (i.e., the server the
user is directly connected to) knows that information, while
everything else is globally known.

It says that the server will answer the command. Therefore, the client used and settings thereof have nothing to do with the behavior. The RFC says nothing about whether the server may do anything else (e.g. notify the target user anyway or log the event), so servers are allowed to do anything that does not violate the specification.

In practice, I haven't seen any servers that will notify a normal user that a /whois was done on them. It's still possible, however. That's still a property of the server, and no IRC client program can affect whether the server will create such notifications.

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