As mentioned above, this is because mIRC is now a Unicode application and will only send and receive UTF-8 encoded text. The purpose is to, ideally, make IRC as a whole non-reliant on codepages, so that everyone will be able to view all characters in all languages. In older versions of mIRC, every user had to manually configure each of their channel/query windows with a specific font and codepage to display one particular language, and this only worked for that language, so if someone new joined the channel, or someone joined that channel and spoke a different language, text would appear as garbage to them and to others. The use of UTF-8 means that none of that is necessary any more. Everyone on IRC will be able to read everyone else's text, regardless of language, without any fiddling or confguring codepages. You can find discussions on this issue
here,
here and
here.
Khaled and argv0, first off, thank you both so much for the reply!
Secondly, I know what Unicode means and what kind of advantages it carries over non-unicode communication. BUT I guess simply expected some kind of backward comparability from v7, meaning that it will communicate in Unicode, BUT it will be able to "understand" older, non-unicode versions.
And the reason is simple, really, I can use the all-new v7 as much as I want to, but the thing is that 90% of the people are still going to use v6 for a long time to come. And what that means FOR ME is that I will not be able to see what all those people are saying, meaning I HAVE TO switch back to latest v6
Is there any work-around here? I mean, to keep using v7 but make it "understand" older clients? Because I love all the new stuff that v7 has to offer, but the Unicode thing is simply killing it at the very root (since communicating is mIRC's job 1).
But again, guys, thank you so much for all the info and your replies!
