On a similar note, how many of the irc-bots support utf-8? (ie eggdrop, energymech)
They don't have to. That's one of the great things about UTF-8.
That being said, i have UTF-8 enabled and i dont believe i have ever not been able to read what somebody has said. Under what circumstances would somebody with UTF-8 enabled not be able to read text that they would be able to read is it was disabled?
The issue at hand is regarding whether mIRC should
send UTF-8 by default; if it did, then a receiver would now fail to see the proper text if all of the following conditions are met:
- The receiving client does not support displaying of UTF-8 or has displaying of UTF-8 disabled;
- The text sent is using characters not in the ASCII 0-127 range (i.e. non-English language);
- The sender and receiver had the same codepage enabled originally (otherwise the receiver would have seen gibberish anyway).
Note that a person with UTF-8 enabled can always still properly see the text of a person with UTF-8 disabled because of the backwards compatibility for non-UTF-8 text.
Personally, I support this suggestion, although it may be a little too early; there will also be many unexpected side effects that people will start having to deal with (e.g. the fact that joining channels with non-UTF8 names but ASCII 128-255 characters in them would become surprisingly hard), so this change would have quite some impact - but eventually this is definitely the way to go.
The second best thing (at least for now) IMO would be a "master switch" in the form of a button in the Options dialog, or a command or so, that allows you to enable all settings necessary for full use of UTF-8 at once. Right now, enabling all the necessary settings one by one (in the options, and then for every window type etc) is just way too cumbersome.
