Below is a specification draft for the IDLE command. See Motivation for the use-case.

#Motivation

When connecting to soju from a phone for a long period of time, battery consumption becomes too high. This is mainly because every message soju sends results in a wake-up of downstream's antenna and CPU. The IDLE command allows a client to tell soju to send messages sparsely, so that the number of wake-ups is reduced.

#Description

The IDLE command is a command that can only be sent by clients. It has an optional parameter: a list of comma (,) separated nicknames, called highlights.

Servers MAY advertise the IDLE ISUPPORT token. This token has no value. Servers that advertise this token support the IDLE command.

When a server receives the IDLE command from a client, its connection with the client becomes idle. When a server receives a command other than IDLE from a client with an idle connection, the connection becomes back to normal (not idle).

When a connection is idle, messages to be sent to the client are buffered on the server until one of the following happens:

• the server buffers a PRIVMSG or NOTICE whose content contains one of the highlights or whose target is the client,
• the server cannot buffer any more messages.

In this case, the server sends all buffered messages to the client, and starts buffering messages again.

#Examples

Case of a client that makes a connection idle, then turns it back to normal with a ping:

C: IDLE taiite,taite,hhirtz
C: PING 25E3CFB