There has been a strange issue with diminishing efficiency of nickname import as the number of nicknames increases and the number of other threads competing for a database lock increases. Apparently it’s too difficult check nicknames before setting, and I’ve seen roughly 3 nicknames every 2 seconds on some portals.

Considering this, and that we have ways of getting nicknames from files (including basic 2-column format), I’ve added a method of taking a parsed list of nicknames and removing it from the nickname base.

The “–removenicknames=” option (“-R”) parses a nickname input (BNA, file://, OCI, HTTP, FTP, same logic as adding) and removes them from the internal nickname base rather than adding.

This would let us:

1. collect new nicknames from all the current sources
2. remove a list of assumed-current nicknames
3. write out the remainder for import

Additionally, collecting the current assumed-current plus the new nicknames gives us the new assumed-current.