Forums mIRC Help Problems with UTF-8 / Channel specific settings

Hello there. I'm asking about a problem with UTF-8 support in the latest version of mIRC, 7.19.

But first some background information. I run a channel on IRCnet, that has scandinavian letters in its name. I don't know if those letters display correctly here, but "Ä" should be "A" with umlauts, and so forth. Anyway. Over the years we've had plenty of problems with the channel name, with multiple IRC-clients. For some reason, while channels #A and #a should be the very same channel, it doesn't apply with (for example) "Ä". That is, #Ä and #ä are actually two different channels, which boggles my mind. To counter this, we decided that the official name for our channel should always be written is small caps, so we actually all end up on the same channel!

For some years, this was an acceptable solution. Back then mIRC didn't support UTF-8, and the majority of our users used mIRC, so most of us where on a level playing field, as it were. But steadily users with the irssi-client increased in numbers. As far as I know, irssi has always supported UTF-8, by default. And by that, irssi-users - by default - couldn't join our channel, since (yet again) it was interpreted in different ways... there were now (theoretically) up to four possible channels: #Ä, #ä, and their UTF-8 counterparts. (In reality the channel name is longer, of course, but the key thing here is that it STARTS with a scandinavian letter.) To remedy this, some irssi-users decided to tailor their settings specifically for our channel. Luckily, in irssi, it's rather easy to set channel specific configurations, so we found work-arounds for this problem.

But then came mIRC 7.0! I, personally, still use version six-point-something, so I'm not clear what has changed, but ever since 7.0 was released, our users have started to have problems joining the channel. In the past, it didn't matter what the "UTF-8 Display" setting was - that is, whether it was ON or OFF - it was still possible to join the channel. (Well, at least as long as the channel name was all written in small caps, that is.) Now mIRC-users, that have the support ON, end up on the wrong channel, the bizarro channel. And some of them are reluctant to turn it OFF, as it affects the messages written by many irssi-users on the network, making them all garbled up.

So... any thoughts on this, or solutions? Why does mIRC nowadays handle differently in this matter, than the earlier versions did? And is it somehow possible to use channel specific UTF-8 configurations?

Thanks for reading! Peace.

There are numerous topics about this and you can easily search the forums to find out all of the information. mIRC supports UTF8. That means that codepage characters are not going to be supported. Any channel you use should stick to UTF8 encoding as codepages are outdated. Basically, why have dozens of codepages that only allow you to view one language correctly when you can have a single encoding that handles all languages? It just makes sense to use UTF8.

So, the best thing you can do to begin with is to have the channel name in UTF8. All major clients support UTF8. In fact, mIRC was one of the last to fully support it. So everyone can get in as long as they have UTF8 enabled and aren't using an obscure or outdated client that doesn't support it.

After that, you are left with 2 possible UTF8 versions... capital and lowercase. Now... this is not a mIRC issue. The networks decide whether or not upper and lowercase are treated as the same thing. For ASCII, they have pretty much always been the same. For UTF8, most or perhaps all network ircds have not made the distinction between upper and lowercase characters and so every character is different and not treated as the same (other than A-Z). If you would like to have upper and lowercase treated as the same in UTF8, then the best thing to do is to bug the network and ircd developers to make that change. If enough people request it, you should start seeing it happen. Right now, few people are requesting it and if that remains the case, it's unlikely to change. In any case, mIRC cannot do anything to solve that for you. It *could* automatically change capital UTF8 to lowercase so you always join the lowercase channel, but that of course means you can't join an uppercase channel. That wouldn't be a good option.

In general, most people type in lowercase except when starting sentences or writing names. Although a channel might look more "interesting" as MyChAnNeL, you'd be better off naming it in all lowercase if it includes UTF8 characters. The same for cases where the capitalization makes it easier to read, such as ThisIsMyChannel instead of thisismychannel. Even then, you need to decide whether you want to make it easy for everyone to join or make it look "nicer." Until (IF) networks start making upper and lowercase the same, you don't really have any other options.

Regardless what you do, I'd strongly recommend using UTF8 encoding. Someday, you will have to make the switch. It might as well be today.