When there are significant changes to the program, this seems to warrant the ability to use those features without wiping out your existing customization.

Recent changes added brand new default favorites to replace the stale items like #windows95, and there's also been recent changes in recent versions to add new networks to the serverlist.

However, there currently doesn't be any way to see them without the all-or-nothing handling of settings and servers.

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When installing, one of the choices is 'servers list'. However, while choosing this item does let you see the new servers being added, people avoid it because this also wipes out all the servers they've manually added to the serverlist, as well as rearranging everything.

Either in addition, or in place of, a more useful feature would be to blend new servers into the serverlist somehow. Perhaps offering the chance to accept or reject individual servers/networks, accept-all, or reject-all, this would let people know about new servers being available without losing all their existing servers. I'm not sure how many prompts there would be if they were prompted only for the new servername/port combos, with choices of whether they want to replace the old port number or add it in addition.

To avoid problems for noobs, it would probably be a good idea to warn them if there's a potential of adding servers which would result in a Group name having both +SSL and non-SSL ports together in the same list, since they wouldn't want the luck of the draw to determine whether the next connection would be SSL or not.

Something similar is happening this time with the update for the favorites list. I don't know how it happened, but the [chanfolder] section of mirc.ini holding the favorites list is gone, and is also missing from the latest week's worth of daily backup of mirc.ini that i'd made. I don't know whether mirc.ini was garbled during a BSOD and was rebuilt without that section, or whether one of the beta's wiped it out because of not conforming to whatever is the new setup. But I know that I did not delete the favorites after 7.67

There are also many users who have deleted their [chanfolder] section for 2 reasons. The 1st is of course that most if not all of those channels no longer existed. The 2nd is due to times when there was a frequent incidence of mirc.ini getting garbled. It's not as often now, but I still see people coming into the help channel asking for help with the problem.

In one channel, I had advised users back then to prune down that [section], because there seemed anecdotal evidence that the incidence of garbled mirc.ini seemed to be lower for those whose mirc.ini had a filesize below 8kb, and this seemed to help that group of users have the problem less often after they trimmed it. The reasoning was that a smaller file would be less likely to be held open or be in the middle of a disk write when the crash happened.

But, in any case, the only way for users now to have access to the updated favorites list is to allow their settings files to be wiped out and replaced by all default settings, which includes deleting their color, fonts, etc - as well as having all their scripts unloaded because the new .ini doesn't have the [rfiles] section anymore - which can be confusing for someone who was sure that they hadn't checked the box for replacing their scripts. I'm assuming the only scripts that don't get uninstalled, is when people use only the default name/location for aliases.ini and remote.ini

Instead of a blanket 'mirc settings' choice, at the very least there should either be an easy way to opt-out the portion of settings that people are less like to want to lose, or an easy way to opt-in only selected settings such as blending in new favorites.

It's not easy to blend the contents of a backup mirc.ini's favorites list into the new favorites list, because this must be done in notepad, and settings can be lost easily due to a typing error, and it can be easy done without realizing it happened before it's too late, or even without realizing it at all.

As a test, I edited the new mirc.ini where [chanfolders] had n101= as the line for #Vegetarian, and added an extra item to that section where I changed the channel name but kept the n101= the same. After mIRC loaded this updated mirc.ini, the new channel at the duplicate n101= was there, but #Vegetarian was gone. If someone wanted to add new favorites to the tail end of the favorites list, there's not an easy way to do this, and it's easy to for errors in the nRENAME= editing to either overwrite an existing favorite, or accidentally add 2 new favorites with the same nITEM= resulting in only 1 of them being added. Same goes with trying to blend new servers into someone's customized serverlist.