Bug 78106

/who is supported in HEAD.

Sending /<*> to the KMM when it is not a real command is for convenience sake for several reasons.. a) pasting text that starts with /<foo>, b) in other protocols people are not really used to /<*> being a command and may type this on purpose.

I don't really see any reason why /noexistcommand should not be sent, I have often wished myself for this many many times in XChat and KSirc etc.

It shouldn't do so because it's heavily inconsistent which is a nightmare, usability-wise. To counter your axamples:
a) No, I can't paste anything and rely on it to *not* trigger a command.
b) It's true that especially IM users aren't used to the slash-commands (as no other protocol supports something like this). But now you're in a situtaion where it some times work and sometimes not. Do I have to remember all implemented commands if I want to type something starting with a slash? No, I should have to remember/learn that a slash starts a command, period. If I post something with a leading slash and thats no known command, Kopete should give me an error so I know about this.

A good example, in both directions, is /who:
1. In Kopete 0.8 I can type "/who are you?/" (to add emphasis) and it will go to the chan. Now I get used to it and continue to do so in 0.9. Oops. Doesn't "work" anymore.
2. I try (better: tried, this was when I noticed this) the /who command. And the stuff goes to the chan, everybody (exaggerated) says "haha, you lamer".

Even worse, imagine I come from mIRC and there I created a nice macro /m for /msg. Now I want to msg somebody privately and say "/m you suck". Oops. I never intended to say that publically.

It often bit myself that I can't paste strings starting with a slash to IRC clients. But while that's inconvinient on the first look, I prefer this over a "maybe it works, maybe not" approach.

A solution might be to make this configurable. Add two options, a "master" one which says "Enable IRC slash-commands" (defaulting to on) and a second one which says "Interpret unknown commands as text" (defaulting to off).

The first time an IRC users types a line starting with a slash he could also get a message box which says something like

  "You typed text which started with a slash. In IRC the slash is commonly"
  "used to start special IRC commands."
  "The word /foo you typed is a recognized command. Do you want to execute
  "it (instead of sending it as plain text)?"
  "[ ] Do not ask me again."
  "[[Yes]] [No] [Cancel]"
Or
  "You typed text which started with a slash. In IRC the slash is commonly"
  "used to start special IRC commands."
  "The word /bar you typed is not a recognized command. Do you want to send"
  "it as plain text?"
  "[ ] Do not ask me again."
  "[Yes] [[No]]"

Comment #2 does say it already, but I've to add one more reason;
Let's say you like to register your nick and therefore use the "/identify nick password"-stuff. Bussiness as usual you wrote /idenntify nick password" and volia... everybody is able to read your password. Yes, I saw a lot of passwords flying around the irc cause of that... It would also a good idear to check if [\s]+/command was given and maybe just remove those whitepace then...

Good example, you are right of course.

*** Bug 100645 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

PROTIP: Make it a user choice! There is no perfect setup for everyone, and there is no absolute best choice. It’s basic physics. Duh.
Problem solved.  :)

Dear user, unfortunately Kopete is no longer maintained.

Please migrate to another solution, e.g. for Jabber a possibility is Kaidan, for Matrix a candidate is NeoChat.