You still haven't answered my question:
Out of curiosity, how many of the users in the channel you're trying to join are on clients that are NOT mIRC? My guess would be that the majority are on pre-7.x versions of the client.
That doesn't matter, since it is the new mIRC that cause the problem. I got no idea what chat clients other use, I my guess would be the same as your. The problem comes by adding a feature that effect the network in such a big way as this do. I got no problem at all with channel text beeing in utf-8, even tho i suspect it would cause problem for mIRC itself when they click a #channelname and it leads to wrong channel.
To me there is several bigger problems.
- channels in upper and lower cases are not treated as same channel.
- when above is fixed, there is a problem merging those channels into one channel again, this cause a headache, because even if the oldest channel owner get to keep the channel, it will make some users upset.
- several different channel names for the same channel depending how you mix upper and lower cases in channel names.
another possible problem would be for networks that allow utf-8 nicknames (undernet doesn't) this would mean that the name Björn and BJÖRN are two different nicknames, so messages to an upper and lower cased name would end up at different users.
I know we can tell all users to disable utf-8 in mIRC until the network supports utf-8, but still, enabling it by default have caused a problem and wasn't the smartest thing to do until all major networks fully supported utf fully.
