You obviously are going to want to use sockets to accomplish this. The voting will be based on how well the search engine works. There will be quite a few people voting for the winner, so please if you can not accept coming in 2nd or 20th place, DO NOT ENTER.

Challenge Entries:

There were 3 challenges submitted and each were voted on by 7 different people. The entries are listed in order of number of votes.

Ymar_The_Leprechaun

Voter Place Comment tabo 1 great entry, my only complains are that you must edit the options before you can use it, there are no "default" settings, and also, the method used to add servers isn't very good if you want to select a few servers from a big list, other than that, it's very good Lisa 2 This was going to be my first choice, at face value, it had everything, multiple options, small size, an impressive dialog, but I just couldn't get it to return anything :( . I messed with the settings to no avail, maybe if it had come pre configured with a default set up it would have helped, or maybe if the readme had suggested some values, I may have got it to work. Sorry Ymar :( Zane 1 Best all around, nice dialog, easy to use, many options... one problem... if you don't set the max # of connections, it won't connect at all, it just sits at "Please Wait" fubar 1 Very well done, most options to choose from, and generated servers from your serviers.ini. Dialogs were set up nice and were easy to navigate. Had a few bugs and had to edit some options before using. dohcan 1 most features, buggy though, because it doesn't come with defaults set. nukem 1 It had the most options for searching (channels, nicks, addresses, with MOTD, Links,and channel list also) Ophidian 1 Works well and has a plethora of search options (including enabling of its own ident daemon if you so desire). also has fairly indepth documentation.

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Kamek

Voter Place Comment tabo 2 it's great, the best interface, i loved that errorlog, but it only looks for channels, not nicknames or hostmasks... Lisa 1 Despite this being the largest, and only being able to do #channel searches, I felt this was beautifully executed, it had popups, unload, load, and more importantly it worked!, it did exactly as it said it would. And as I'm not the greatest user of hard to follow stuff I felt it was perfect. Kamek, you really should enhance it still further with different search options, well done :) Zane 3 His addon was quite nice... once again I preferr having popups, but the main downside was the only thing his addon searched for was channels, the servers.ini parser was very nice, and speedy, but the addon was just too limited compared to the others. Had he included options to search for more things "nicknames, hostmasks,even files, he would have easily gotten 1st. fubar 2 A close second. Best looking and nice setup, but it only search for channels. dohcan 2 looks/works the best, but can only search for channels... nukem 3 Good, but only searched for channels Ophidian 3 Need to be running an identd for it to work it seems. At first it didnt seem to work at all but then nukem pointed out to me that it looks for channel info not people info ;} . it does work, however when it displays the information it uses a @listbox with tabbed columns. the server column width doesnt really allow for a very long server name so it could get partially overwritten by the channel name info and the number of ppl on channel info.

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Eric^^

Voter Place Comment tabo 3 it searchs only in one server at a time, the "status" field is too small to see the error messages sent by the server when a connection is refused, and in some servers i get a "getting information on nick" forever... Lisa 3 Obviously individual preferences count, and I'm afraid, that for me personally I'm a "popup" person, command line stuff just doesn't cut it for me. Having said that, I did manage to get the dialog up, I'm afraid that maybe I was spoilt after seeing the other two, that having to manually work out a server address, and target was beyond me. I did get it to work however, and it worked ok, good for the keyboard junkies maybe. Sorry Eric^^ Zane 2 Though I didn't like not having popups, and the searcher had fewer capabilities, it seemed to work quite well and quickly. fubar 3 Good job, only not as quite as good as the others. Only searched one server at a time and didn't come with any servers to choose from. Dialogs were a little small and some info seemed a little tight. dohcan 3 OK job, but not quite as good as the other two. nukem 2 Not as good as Ymar's Ophidian 2 Works just as well as ymar's but doesnt have as many options. Readme only has install instructions, but on load more documentation is /echo-ed to the status window.

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