I think some of the assumptions that IRC is no longer popular are a little misleading. Not that they're not true, IRC is less popular today for the mainstream demographic, and there are fewer users on IRC than a few years ago, however:
1. There are (way) more users on IRC than there were in 1998. [
netsplit.de stats]
2. The mainstream demographic that left IRC was never the main demographic for IRC in the first place. IRC has always been something of a "fringe" mode of communication, especially since it is text only, decentralized and has a fairly limited protocol. Basically, the people who left were young users who grew up and moved on. They would likely have moved on anyway-- the only difference is that there is less influx of new young users thanks to better chat mediums like Facebook. Again, I refer to #1 to explain why this is not necessarily a bad thing.
3. Activity on the mIRC forums has its own cycle. Yes, it has been deader than it used to be 3-4 years ago, however, if you look back just prior to the 7.x betas, the forums were even more dead than they are now (1 bug report / suggestion every week at most.. today we get a couple a day). In general, activity tends to be closely linked to the amount of development on the client. Whenever Khaled goes into "release mode" (today known as beta mode), activity tends to be pretty high on the forums, rivaling the activity of a few years ago. Basically, the forums are dead lately because we are in the middle of a "cooling off" period. Khaled will eventually start work on the next version (unless he already has), in which case the forums will pick up again with suggestions, reports, and other.
4. Finally, this is not about the activity, but more about the size of the scripting community. Yes, I will agree that scripting communities have died down. There might be a few reasons for this, but I don't think it's the decline of users (again, see point #1). I think it's more to do with the fact that there are enough scripts written for mIRC that almost everything has been implemented by now. This, coupled with the fact that there is also less demand-- not because there are less users on IRC, but because there is less of a special kind of user on IRC. The same demographic that grew out of IRC was the same demographic that happened to be the largest script users. As users grow up, however, ASCII scripts, popups, hangman games, etc., all become a little dated. Since there are less new young users on IRC, there is less demand for these scripts. These scripts were the easiest to create, and therefore were the "bread and butter" of the scripting community.
It's also important to note that scripting experience tends to have a very steep dropoff curve. There are far fewer advanced scripters than new ones, and my guess is that users won't invest enough time into mIRC scripting to gain "advanced" experience. This is either because they don't care enough about IRC in general, or because mIRC is a domain specific language that has little value outside of IRC. That makes it a tough sell to convince someone to learn the ins and outs of the language. Because of this, only a handful of users are able to create the truly advanced scripts, and because the "easy" scripts (ASCII scripts, games, etc.) are in less demand right now, there are simply less people to produce the scripts that people might want (there are also hundreds of available scripts to choose from, which is also a reason for smaller supply). For instance, I've seen a few requests on the forums and other venues for Twitter/MSN clients or "to IRC" bridge servers, but this is a fairly complex feat. Therefore, there are less people who can make the things that people want, because people want more complex scripts, and therefore mIRC has reached some kind of usefulness versus difficulty impasse. This is not necessarily mIRC's fault, and this doesn't mean we need to make it easier to script X, Y or Z. It simply means that there is little payoff to devote enormous resources for an IRC script, since the complexity level needs to be higher-- often too high to justify the effort.
That said, I have to reiterate that there are plenty of good quality working scripts out there for (almost) every imaginable task. Would it be nice to have a thriving community of scripters? Sure. Do we still need it? I wouldn't say we
need it; there are already enough scripts to satisfy most mIRC users.
