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.
Why can't this be automatic? You select the dictionaries you want and when the choices have been confirmed, the dictionaries are auto-installed. Nice and easy.
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?
Adding words to the dictionary would of course be entirely optional, not manditory. If you choose not to do this and you don't like the words still being highlighted, disable the feature.
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.
Why can't multiple dictionaries used be in conjunction with each other? Spell checkers only check each individual word that you type against what it has in it's pre-defined list of words. Why can't it compare each word that is typed against multiple lists of words and if said word is NOT found in any of them, mark it as an error.
IRC is written communication indeed, but it is not formal.
Correct, IRC isn't formal - but some people still like to take accuracy in what it is they are trying to communicate. I, for one, am a member of this particular type of people and see nothing wrong with communicate as clearly as possible.
I'm still not seeing where the problem with this suggestion lies. If implamented a la GAIM, it will ONLY highlight the errors of text in the text box, and not the buffer. There will be no masses of squiggly lines everywhere, no annoying boxes popping up all over the place telling you you can't spell and no restriction which says you can't turn it off. It really is a genuinely useful feature. Why so much negativity about it, people?
