mirc has the power to manage a healthy sized network of your friends.
Quite true. Especially for those able to fit their friends into a phone box. Imagine being an oper on a single-threading mIRC-script based server and doing an /ns list * ...
While mIRC serves all nickname registrations to that oper no-one else can do a single thing but wait.
My suggestion is that the user download a wIRCd and play with that. It's not hard to set up but does require some IRC experience and knowledge of terminologies such as o:line and u:line. If that is beyond comprehension or you want to run a serious server then save up a few thou' and purchase a CR licence. That way you can set things up in mIRC via AdminServ, online via a web browser or on the server itself with a dialogue box.
While mIRC has the ability to perform any IRC function, it cannot do it successfully with many users. That is why IRCds are written.
