What you are seeing with these notices is really a server design issue. Server coders should never have used notices to display large amount of information to users. It shows how disconnected some server coders are from how GUI clients work. Prior to this, a notice had always been used to indicate a special message that was meant to alert a user to a particular event or important information. That is why a notice was assigned a special sound in mIRC. And why a notice is always surrounded by two separators. It had never been used to display streams of information to users and probably was never intended for that.
Even though the whole issue is not very important, I do not agree that this in particular is a fair view.
When I started using mIRC on a daily basis, early 1997, notices were widely used for the purpose of communicating fairly large amounts of data at once--due to, in particular, the prevalence of eggdrop bots. As such, back then, having a sound assigned to notices was already a default that was quite frankly out of touch. Notices were and always have been the way to send information from an
automated system: that is what they were specifically designed to do, as stated and explained in RFC 1459 (which I believe was around before mIRC's development started; otherwise it wasn't long after). The
volume of information sent from that automated system was never a factor, and thus, there was nothing that would suggest that (say) eggdrops should use PRIVMSG rather than NOTICE for large streams of information--quite the opposite, in fact. Thus, I believe the middle portion of what I quoted above is either an idealized version of the past, or based on input at the time that was too limited.
As for notices coming from
services, that is a somewhat different issue, and one that is relevant for the separators more than the sounds. I do not know what considerations went into using notices rather than numeric replies for service information, but I strongly suspect it has its roots in the original versions of services being
clients rather than
servers. In that case, the use of notices was a perfectly reasonable approach, being the standard and RFC-approved way for automated (non-server) processes to send textual information. Either way, by the time I started using mIRC, such services were already around. As such, I think your above view is opposing something that has been a done deal for
at least 21 years (i.e., over 85% of mIRC's lifetime so far), and cannot reasonably be used anymore to defend what is effectively a (small but) solvable client-side annoyance.
Edit: removed silly ending, thanks Raccoon
