It is much easier to add backward-compatibility into most popular IRC-client instead of asking network administration of every IRC-network to implement UTF-8 support and wait 'till it will be done.
Don't you agree? >_>
Quite simply: no, I don't agree.
mIRC had support for codepages at the loss of proper Unicode support. mIRC decided to do one thing well and now supports Unicode properly at the loss of codepages. In theory, backwards compatibility is nice-- in practice, it's one or the other. This is likely why your IRC servers have "experimental" UTF-8 support; because it's complicated to support multiple encodings. It's actually easier on the server end, but that's a discussion for ircd implementors, not this forum.
If mIRC doesn't ask networks to start supporting UTF-8, it will never get done. It's not considered "backwards-compatibility" if mIRC plans on supporting codepages forever; so if mIRC doesn't start pushing a little harder, the networks won't do anything. It's important to point out that even mIRC has supported UTF-8 for almost 4 years now. The Unicodization of mIRC was impending for many years now, and your networks did absolutely nothing-- that's embarrassing. Clearly mIRC needs to start taking a more aggressive stance, as the more popular IRC client out there.
mIRC wants to do the right thing and move people away from codepages and onto a proper encoding; the encoding that every modern OS supports, almost all of the web uses, and most other IRC clients use. I'm talking about Unicode, of course. The percentage of support on the servers you use might be low right now, but by releasing mIRC 7, this will change. That's a good thing.
As a sidenote, mIRC is not forcing you to immediately upgrade to 7.1 as soon as it is available. 7.x has been put out there as a beta to show people how mIRC will be working. This gives your network admins time to start improving their Unicode support. They may not be done by 7.1, but you can continue to use 6.35 and tell them to start taking Unicode more seriously.
You shouldn't be complaining about the lack of support for codepages here-- you should be complaining about the lack of support for UTF-8 on your network. If you took the time to write them the same kind of posts you wrote here, maybe they would actually do something about it, rather than having you wait indefinitely.
