Forums General Discussion The future of mIRC ?

I was reading the "About" thing on mIRC. and Khaled said he's probly got another year or two on working mIRC. i was just wondering does anyone know what will happen to mIRC after khaled stops? new owner dude? it dies? what happens someone tell me!!!

Who knows what may be in store for mIRC. When that time comes i'm sure everyone will know. Sorry but nobody here would probably know the answer except Khaled.

I can't belive Khaled will leave himself anyway ... but if he does I'm pretty sure he will find some one else to continiou his work! mIRC has millions of users!!

I think mIRC will stop being developed and IRC will fall into decline with it, but not because of it. Nothing lasts forever and I would suggest that mIRC in it's current form has not got much further to go development-wise. It would need to see introduction of some non-core features like DCC based video chat, whiteboards, etc.

Looking at IRC in general, I believe that the big networks will start to shake off alot of 'fat' as they implement no filesharing policies and then start to enforce them. The big four are largly big only because they have huge populations of bots and second connections, along with many bot-net channels as well.

Inside of ten years I think that most chat networks will either perish or be Java or ActiveX chats only, similar to what Nine-MSN did a couple of years ago. Remaining IRC servers open to mIRC and other clients will be small ones or those run by ISP's as part of a member services product. Because of this mIRC and other clients will not be in such high demand.

If the number of people using IRC went down why would IRC servers close their doors to the most popular method of getting on IRC (actual clients)? I doubt many networks will implement no-filesharing policies, even less will enforce them, less again will enforce them to the point that filesharing is impossible. Plenty of people still use IRC and, I believe, will continue to do so for many years to come. It simply can't be beat for group chat - text is by far the best medium for any significant number of people to communicate together. Whether mIRC continues to be developed or not it'll probably be several years later before another client comes close to matching it's userbase.

It has been gradually and slowly happening for a few years. IRC is a great medium, especially when customisation via third party software like mIRC is utilised, but it brings bad with good. How many script (war) kiddies are you going to find on places like Yahoo? I would suggest not many. BigPond ran some Java-Only channels for a long time with alot of success. Nine-MSN runs ActiveX based chat and doesn't look like going back. As does it's American sister-unit MSN. Remember the old MSN IRC server, full of clones and not alot else for a number of years, the opers there either didn't care or were too silly to know how to stop them.

My view is, there will be many webchat based networks and most of the rest will just continue to sulk about being DDoS'd in their newsletter pages. Incidentally DDoS is an issue on big networks and small. If I had a dollar for each war bot I have nailed in the last 18 months I would be able to buy the service and afford to run it for the rest of time.

Whilst on the subject of money, IRC do cost money to run and in many cases plenty of it. There won't be many owners of chat networks that get a return on these significant investments. They do it because they can which is a perfect guarantee that it won't last on the scale it exists on now.

Even if he does quit I will continue to use mIRC. It is the best IRC client out there and I can't see anything getting better than it for a long time.

I agree. mIRC is pretty hard to beat, by any standards.

You're talking about IRC servers being victims of DDoS attacks as a reason for IRC dying, but there's absolutely no reason why any other means of chatting would fare any better. MSN is no less likely to be attacked, neither is any IRC server using Java clients to connect. The only reason standard IRC servers accepting standard connections currently take the brunt of DoS attacks is because they are currently by far the most used servers. If those IRC servers dry up then the users, lamers and all, are going to go somewhere else - and then suddenly that will be subjected to the same ordeal. It's a mystery to me why people assume that IRC servers are the only chat medium vulnerable to attack.

You're talking about IRC servers being victims of DDoS attacks as a reason for IRC dying, but there's absolutely no reason why any other means of chatting would fare any better.

No, it is one of many reasons. If you'd like a complete speech I'd be happy to oblige you. Put an hour aside to read it though. As far as Java or other forms of web-based chatting goes, I have no vested interest in any particular format of chat, though I do enjoy using mIRC. I'm just making an observation here which is as plain as looking at the sun - web-based chat is not only with us, it is also popular. Whilst where I chat is open to all clients webchat accounts for about 2/5ths of all connections with 99.9% of the remainder being mIRC and the 0.01% left is other clients like X Chat which are used by the (very) small Linux/Unix following. This is in spite of the fact that the network is open to all client types and that most users know of the existance of mIRC and mIRC scripts.

More and more there are people who use IRC that are not savvy with setting up software. Yes mIRC is easy to set up, especially for me and you and most that read this post, though not everyone has experience with this sort of thing and clicking on a link that opens the chatroom in IE (or whatever your preferred Java enabled browser is) is going to be far more tempting, even if you do end up missing out on half the junk that comes in many scripts like talkers and silly looking MP3 banners ("I am playing Ring Ring by ABBA - 44kHz Joint Stereo") etc etc, which never contribute anything to a good old fashioned topical discussion.