i understand, the devs not very interested into implement FiSH, for some reasons.

but seriously, in thouse days, where every stupid hacker, goverment or whoever tracking, hacking, sniffing or reading out, personal datas, chats, emails or other informations, its more than important, to keep chat in private (encrypted).

i use irc ALOT (its like 98% of communication on the internet i do), and i encrypt nearly all my chat now.

here some infos, about my mainchat:
* we have 23 static users there.
* till 7.x release of mIRC, 12 users used mIRC.
* after the release of mIRC 7.x, 8 users switched to XChat, cause of implementation Problems of the known fish.secure.la.
* today we still have 23 users, only 2 of em (one of thouse is me) still using mIRC.

i know, this isnt maybe representativ for the whole mIRC Community, but i think, this shows the tendences, how bad peoples today want to have a secure communcation. imho you cant ignore that fact and override it.