Please see
this. In short, you need to use channels with correct UTF8 characters in mIRC 7.x. Otherwise, you'll have to stick to mIRC 6.35 if you want to continue to use channels with code page characters. Note that ALL channel names can be done in UTF8 if channel owners want to migrate their channels to the UTF8 version of the characters. Many don't want to make the effort to do that, unfortunately. Also, some networks don't support UTF8, which makes it more challenging to use it. Unicode lets you have access to every language in the world using one standard rather than having to change code pages in order to access other languages. It's definitely a better way to handle languages.
