Once you have been on IRC long enough to find friends that are interested in talking to you, you will begin to notice something odd. Your friends will apparently acquire a magical ability to know when you get on IRC. The reason they can do this is that, in the jargon, they've "got you on notify".
Most likely you will also meet people that you don't get along with, and that you want to avoid hearing from. Unlike real life this is possible on IRC, and ignoring each other on IRC is much recommended over open conflict.
When someone is on ignore, their messages are filtered out and you never even see them or know they are there.
Keeping track of your friends on IRC ( /Notify )
This is done with a command called "/notify". To use it just enter the command and the nickname you want to track and Snak will remember it.
You can also open the list window and go to the notify panel and press "Add..." and enter the nickname to add a nickname to your notify list.
 
In this example two people are on the notify list. One is present (url) and is colored red. The other (helle) is not currently on IRC.
When someone from the notify list enter or leave IRC, you will get a message in the top window letting you know.
To remove someone from the list you can either drag the nickname from the list to the trash, select it and press Delete or you can type "/notify -nickname".
The minus sign tells Snak to remove nickname from the list.
Ignoring bothersome people
If someone is harassing you with unwanted private messages you can use the IgnoreLastMessanger command in the tools menu. That will add the sender to the ignore list.
The Ignore panel in the list window displays the list of Ignore masks that you have entered. The program will compare the senders of incoming messages with this list and filter out those that match.
From the panel you can edit,delete and create Ignore masks, but the program also supports the /ignore command.
An ignore mask can simply be the nick name or it can be a complex expression that includes the user host address of the nick so that the offender can't just change his nick to bypass your ignore.
Pressing the Add button, or selecting a line and editing it will bring up the ignore options dialog:
 
Snak supports time limited ignores, so if someone is only temporarily obnoxious you can put on a time limit. At the end of this time the user will automatically be taken off the ignore list.
