calzoneman
Channel "whitelist" feature
It would be convenient to have an additional level of trust, in the form of having a channel "whitelist", where trusted users can enter a channel (perhaps even one that's password-protected...?) without giving them a rank that would grant any additional privileges, as rank =>= 2 does now.
While I hate the concept of safe spaces, I could see the use for this. Akin to the "citizen" versus "civilian" distinction made in Starship Troopers, a rank that signifies only that the user can bypass the password prompt, enabling the regulars to not have to seek out some 3rd party source of truth for the password.
However the use case is very corner. An esoteric niche, I'm not sure the features existence would justify the code maintenance.
I believe the idea of an updated ACL style channel permissions system was discussed before actually. This could be implemented easily as an additional feature were that notion revisited.
Yes, in #252
This was meant more as a convenience for channel owners than anything else. A one-click validation of trusted users seems like it would be handy.
I think it's more about supporting private communities, such as the +s/+i IRC channels I'm in. When the channel is centered around a small, tight-knit group of people it doesn't really make sense to make it public. The channel password feature was originally added to support a particular channel that ran weekly events but wanted to lock down the channel during the week, and it was the easiest/fastest solution at the time. It's not really an elegant solution for invite-only channels.
It also sort of exposes the need for a more general channel roles concept that has been requested before -- numeric ranks aren't really what people want a lot of the time, and in this case for example I could imagine "can join the channel" being a permission that is applied to a specific group name which can have users associated with it. That makes it a more generic feature and not a one-off "this is a whitelist of users" feature.