In the link included in my previous post on this thread, OP commented that he can't find any network supporting this feature.
I connected to a few networks a moment ago and found that Undernet supports this feature. I stopped checking after that, so it's possible that some other ircds support the feature as well.
In that link you explain that mIRC does not check for any status (op etc) to hide the key, if the key received is '*', mIRC hides it.
Indeed.
mIRC should never have taken the liberty to hide the key like that, it's not in the rfc and there was no way to identify if the server supported it.
The whole process of IRC development since 1994 has been about taking liberties, and going beyond the RFC, both for client and server developers. That is how so many of the improvements in client and server features came about. Now that we have numeric 005 and CAP, the process should hopefully be more coordinated.
The reason that support for hidden channel keys was not limited to a particular ircd was because it was not clear which ircds were/were not supporting the feature, which was a common issue at the time.
On all of them, mIRC behaves the same and pull the previously set key.
Yes, that's intentional. See
versions.txt mIRC 7.48, item 41.
