They are a dying breed, and rightly so. I think the function can be ripped out because it's not working correctly at the moment anyway.

Similar functionality can be achieved through some scripting/DLL magic. In fact, that's exactly what I did when I realized JIS/SJIS conversion and UTF-8 were never going to work well together in mIRC, but my DLL is just a quick hack and I'm not planning on releasing it.

Eventually I didn't even need that because I was able to convince my friends to switch to clients that support UTF-8. If you chat on Japanese channels where people insist on using Japanese software (or are simply unable to use mIRC because of the language barrier), tell them to switch to the latest version of an IRC client called Cotton. That one supports UTF-8 just fine.

And I still think mIRC should also output UTF-8 by default. Please, Khaled, I beg you.