If mIRC auto-scrolling causes you anxiety to the point where your breathing and blood pressure are affected, or you get the feeling that you have "to keep up or be left behind" I think you're taking chatting -and life- way too seriously.
I agree that disabling auto-scroll would reduce "the addicting nature of chat", in the same way that putting a peice of cardboard in front of your TV would reduce the addictive nature of television. Make something inconvenient to use properly and it's bound to reduce it's 'addictiveness'.
We're talking about chatting which is, in essence, a conversation. A conversation typically doesn't get very far unless you know what the other person has just said. It's no good reading and responding to what someone said 10 minutes ago if they've said a dozen other things since then. It'll simply be impossible for them to follow the conversation.
If this is all coming about from you having a slow conversation in a busy channel with a lot of faster moving conversations in between, well that's why IRC has private messages and the ability for anyone to create a new channel. This way you and those you're chatting with can take your conversation somewhere more suited to your conversational tastes.
Whatever Khaled may decide about adding an option for this, it certainly shouldn't be the default. Yes, that way those few who want it don't have to think about it, instead the overwhelming majority of users do. Not exactly logical is it?
