That means it will become less of an issue as people simply upgrade to 7.x. The issue isn't as complicated as implementing server-side anything. It's simply about educating users to upgrade.
You seem to totally misunderstand the problem, the problem is with users that use the new version of mIRC. If they update they will have problem since the irc servers treat lower and upper cases as different characters. The solution would be to tell all users that has a problem to deactivate utf-8 support in mIRC to be able to join their old channels.
You see, when they type #ö in old mIRC, they join one channel, if they type #ö in new mIRC, they join another channel, and if they type #Ö they join a third channel, none of these channels are the same.
so users with channels registered with channel services are now unable to join their registered channel unless they, and all their friends, deactivate utf-8 support, or wait for the networks to update channel service, and the ircd.
So the answer to the problem is not to upgrade mIRC, but to either wait until all networks update services and servers to support utf-8, or to tell all users with problem to deactivate utf-8 support in mIRC.
