The issue of rudeness has been taken up in private message, that's the end of that topic.
I don't think any suggestion is a waste, I'm grateful to all people who offer up suggestions. The points I raised, as I have said, are not my own but ones I've gathered from the other threads that talk about spell checkers. Nevertheless, I agree with many of those points and whilst I don't think the person who posted has wasted their time, and I have no idea what Khaled's feelings are about the issue, I don't personally agree with having a spell checker put into mIRC.
Firstly, something was said about downloading dictionaries? And where are they to be downloaded from? The mIRC website? Ok, so there are people who have problems writing their nickname into a text box in mIRC Options, and now they are expected to download a dictionary, I assume put it in their mIRC directory and somehow load it into mIRC, then enable the dictionary. Oh yes, I can see the forum threads already. No matter how easy you make it people will have issues - they've installed the wrong dictionary, they don't understand how to do it etc.
And adding words to the dictionary so that it doesn't pick them up? I can see people loving having to do that. The average abbreviations used by IRCers, sure, but I know plenty of people who use 'u', 'pls' and so forth in their normal typing - they aren't kiddy newbie chatters, they're quite experienced IRCers, a lot of them adults, some of them opers on big networks. And what about onomatopoeia? Written sounds like 'pft', 'hehehehe'. What if one day you type 'heheh' and 'pffttt'. Do you need to add every variation you're every going to use?
And what about people who chat in more than one language? I know a lot of people who speak Swedish AND English. Filipino AND English. Is mIRC meant to improve their spelling for both languages? What if there are conflicts with similar words? Some people can speak fluently in 4, sometimes 5 (sometimes more!) languages and I'm sure they do so via IRC - what if they want to use the spell checker for all languages? Or are they to be forced only to use one? The suggestion that was offered up for this seems like a long and tedious workaround. Setting a different dictionary for different private chats/channels? What about channels which allow BOTH languages to be spoken and someone regularly uses BOTH languages in a channel? For example, #mIRC on Quakenet allows German and English. #Help on DALnet allows help in absolutely any language.
This seems like another IM client suggestion like the smileys were. mIRC isn't an IM client, if you really want it to be there are DLLs and addons out there that you can use to bring those features in.
IRC is written communication indeed, but it is not formal. You don't have to type a formal essay every time you speak. I don't see this improving the quality of chat and I don't see this improving the quality of spelling for those that really need it. I mean really, the only 'illiterate' people I come across are people from countries such as Kuwait or Malaysia that have a lot of difficulty speaking English - they aren't going to benefit from a spell checker as more often than not most humans can't work out what some people are saying, let alone a dictionary that hasn't got a brain!
My 2 cents.
Regards,
