I am not denying they can be useful, I am questioning how this should be achieved. You are connected, you receive the messages, you aren't, you don't. You don't

I am not denying they can be useful, I am questioning how this should be achieved. You are connected, you receive the messages, you aren't, you don't. You don't want to miss anything, how about making sure you stay connected? Is this really something that has to be built into the chat protocol, massively increasing its complexity and just giving headaches, security issues, debug problems, wasting developers' time? I don't consider IRC a replacement for online boards / stackexchange. Even stopped logging completely, don't use a bouncer. If I am online, I'm there. Actually think it's an improvement.