The main reason I use an IRC bouncer is so I can detach from the bouncer and get the messages I missed the next time I attach to it again. ZNC provides support for this feature by default, however, there is a third-party module called Playback that has some additional bells and whistles.
To properly utilize the Playback module, you need to adjust two settings on your bouncer and your IRC client needs to do some minor lifting. After searching the internet far and wide, I have not come across a premade AdiIRC script that worked the way I wanted it to, so I figured it was high time to improve the situation.
So what do we actually need to teach our IRC client? Essentially, the client needs to keep track of when it received the network’s last message, so it can request all newer messages that are newer than this timestamp from the bouncer upon reconnect. Sounds easy enough, especially since there were some example scripts for other clients linked on the wiki page for Playback.
I wired up a basic mIRC/AdiIRC script that will retain timestamps of ZNC connections on a per-network basis. Instead of merely updating the timestamp when a PRIVMSG comes in, the script also updates the timestamp on JOIN/PART events to cover “quiet” channels/networks.
To avoid the odd timezone problems, the script will read the timestamp from IRCv3 enabled timestamp parts within events/messages. I still have some odd timezone issues between my own IRCd, bouncer and client, but this is likely due to a configuration problem on my end. On the major networks, the script operates as intended. The data is held in a small hashtable that gets serialized/deserialized to an INI file on exit/startup.