Hi KT,
I think, as you stated that you are not too familiar with XDCC, and it's purpose. The best thing you can do is, go to that packetnews site, enter something to search for, and see what pops up. Then click on one of the links, and see where it takes you in mIRC.
XDCC is designed specifically for mass filesharing. It has nothing to do with sending your friends some pictures, or some movie fragments of your holiday trip etc. XDCC is used solely for distributing movies, mp3's, warez, porn etc. And sites like packetnews are just a handy tool for those who want to participate in mass file sharing, because it keeps a database of many XDCC bots in many networks.
The sad thing is that the owners & ops of many of those file sharing channels, hack other people's computers, and install some script that will act like such an XDCC bot, but totally secret. The person doesn't even know that his computer and bandwith is being used to serve files. Man really, you should go to one of those sites, you'll see what I mean. There are these channels with 1000+ people, and all of them are downloading files. The channels are usually moderated as well, because those XDCC bots can be accesssed with /ctcp. So the only thing that you see when you are in one of those channels is join/parts and the XDCC bots listing their "packs".
In conclusion, I have nothing against you at all, really, but I wanted to explain what XDCC is, and what it is not.
Greets
