This time I'm tagging onto the bottom as it's a general reply.
I don't doubt that Khaled reads the replies.
However, mIRC's user base is in the millions, people who don't even know of these forums. It isn't exactly correct for just a handful of people to have an important impact on whether the feature suggestion will become reality or not.
People who post here tend to think after a while that they should have more rights to decide what feature suggestion should be implemented and which not, but the truth is your opinion is hardly representative for mIRC's entire user base, and it is because of this that I say: don't overestimate the importance of your opinion on a feature suggestion.
You can help Khaled make the better decision though, by providing some cons and pros that he may not think of at the time.
Pro:
-----
* People who have multiple instances of mIRC running that provide different kind of purposes (bots) might want to prevent their system tray from cluttering up with multiple mIRC icons, could be useful for them. Yes, sockets are an alternative, but not everyone knows how to write socket code, plus it's a lot of tedious work. Hiding the instance would be multiple times easier.
Actually at some time I was running 3 instances for various purposes and indeed I did find myself wanting to be able to hide it, as I only need my "chatting" mIRC to be visible, the other ones can run their tasks in the background.
* For those people who want to have mIRC running like a service, this could be an option, mIRC would start at Windows startup and with a script be automatically hidden. As I'm writing this I realize this is kind of overlapping the 1st pro, but anyway...
Con:
-----
Could be helpful for people with malicious purposes to be able to hide mIRC on the client's computer and use it for their own benefits. This is a huge con. Obviously some criteria need to be met before this could happen, though history proves that it can work, otherwise there wouldn't be tons of those people getting exploited every day.
For me personally this isn't even a con, I'm not stupid enough to let myself get exploited. Additionally, there are already plenty of scripting features that allow people to get exploited, these are still there, and I don't think that "because it can be used for malicious intentions" should be the main reason to discard a feature suggestion. Khaled could have it disabled by default when installing mIRC, so that the user would manually need to enable this kind of feature.
Anyway, I'm sure there are more sides to this story, so go on and post why you think it would be a good/bad feature. But don't just state you don't like it without saying exactly why, or without taking the time to think of some positive uses for it either (yes that means you, oblivious). Also if the things you would like to point out have already been mentioned, then there's no reason to reiterate them either.
The attentive reader will have noticed I am now seeing more positive than negative arguments regarding this feature suggestion, in contrast with my first post. That's what happens when you give things more thought and not immediately click that "reply" button because you think you have something to say.
Night folks.
