Forums Feature Suggestions IPv6 support and UTF-8 support...

Well, the title says it all, I guess. IPv6 shouldn't be really hard to implement I think, and it's a really nice protocol, already being used, too. Besides, can't hurt to be prepared for the future... It also gives the people with IPv6 access on an IPv6-supporting server a certain 'leetness' factor ;p, as your IPv6 address shows when you enter a channel and when someone whois-es you ^_^. Wow, doesn't that make you cool or what? Hehehe...

UTF-8 may be a bit harder (then again, it may not), but unicode is becoming more and more commonly used, and very useful at that. Some friends of mine have an IRC server running on Linux, and they have all set UTF-8 as codepage, but unfortunately my OS (Windows XP) does not support that, and neither does mIRC, while at least one should for me to be able to use it. UTF-8 support in mIRC would be a much better alternative to setting the Windows' codepage to JIS for example, as it does not change the system locale or anything, and also supports a wider range of characters. And then maybe I can finally understand what they're typing outside of ASCII (or well... at least try to understand ), and type accented characters etc. without getting a 'we don't understand windows-extended ascii' remark.

XChat2 can already do both, but well, to be honest... it sucks . Anyways at the moment neither are being supported or used very well, but mIRC being a big player on the IRC market it could change for the better. I think that right now especially the lack of UTF-8 support in mIRC is holding back people from using it.


~Grauw

I hear this all the time from people who can't seem to adjust to using new programs. "X-Chat sucks", "Linux sucks", "KDE sucks", "Gnome sucks", "XP sucks", "Win 2K sucks"... Well, boo hoo. I'm not sure I agree X-Chat sucks just because you can't understand it.

But I agree that mIRC should have those features, even if it's only to maintain compatibility with other clients. My stance on this issue is that mIRC should use the UTF-8 encoding as the default encoding, and end the whole encoding issue for now. I think it would benefit IRC as a whole. As an added bonus, it would make it a lot easier to kick people babbling away in foreign languages on some channel, as you could just autodetect it based on Unicode range.

And IPv6 support is always a Good IdeaTM... Though it's not exactly the most urgently needed feature on the list.

Another feature I think would be reasonable to add, though, is the ability to join several servers and channels automatically every time you start the client. I understand this is currently only doable through a script.

Well, on my system at least the GUI of XChat is very slow, and entering text with the Japanese IME doesn't work properly aswell as it only takes the first character of the entered string. And besides, saying it sucks is still a personal opinion .

About UTF-8 as a default encoding... well... yeah... uh... well... in the end it's best ofcourse, but all I care about at the moment is that I can properly read and type UTF-8 ^_^. I think it should be fairly easy to make it a per-channel property, as the font can also be set per-channel. And if the UTF-8 encoding is set, convert all incoming channel text to whatever internal format mIRC is using. Gah, at least in C# and with .NET this is all a non-issue as everything uses Unicode and there are easy converters available ^_^;;. And the NT-based windows offers plenty of unicode functions in its 'regular' API.

About joining several channels and servers... Scripting mIRC is pretty easy... I believe /server -m <server addy> <list of channels> does the trick already (from memory), and make that execute as mIRC starts, or something.

By the way, as I read a little further into UTF-8, there seems to be some 'nastiness' around this topic. Well, at least people aren't always friendly to eachother. I hope people won't flame me for making this request and tell me to use the search function bla bla... I should have tried that one before posting, but then again, would you rather have me pulling an age-old thread to the top again by replying to it?


~Grauw

"would you rather have me pulling an age-old thread to the top again by replying to it?"

In some cases yes, as that way ppl unfamiliar with the subject would be able to see the input others have made along with yours. In addition, it does show you used the search feature, so no one need suggest it to you so that you would be aware of what others have said about it *chuckle*. I can see of course, that in some instances pulling an old thread to the top would be a waste of time. Guess it just depends on the subject and content

I agree about setting UTF-8 as the default. At least half of IRC would convert to UTF-8 overnight if a new mIRC version supported it and had it as the default setting. The rest would pretty much have to follow :-) And Unicode/UTF-8 is truly the end to all character encoding problems.

The only "nastiness" around this topic is some people's ignorant insistance that adding Unicode support is somehow hard and would take an unreasonable amount of resources. That is incorrect and misleading. I have written Win32 programs that support Unicode, and I can definitely say that it isn't hard. I don't even claim to be an expert programmer, so that really should not be an excuse.

Were mIRC an open-source project, I would accept the standard answer "we ain't gonna do it" and just add it myself. But it isn't..

True. Though arguably, people are free to try and write their own clients if they want. That should teach them a thing or two about what coding's actually like. ;D I guess we'll actually see this feature in mIRC in the not-too-distant future, though.

i'd like to see mirc ipv6 able. cause we r runnin an v6 server and non of the common mirc users is able to connect to that server, so we can hardly test this one for the main release of v6 ...
there r a lot of lines within the ircd that has to be changed and has to work, but without a lot of users im sure we'll overlook a lot of stuff...

Well, just use another client to test it, I guess.

u got me wrong.. im able to test the stuff.
But the users we currently have on our net arnt. and we need those guys to test the new v6 support beneath real conditions.

I am not a major user of IRC but I do have need of a Windows client with IPv6 support.
As soon as mIRC has native support for IPv6 I will be buying a registered copy!

UTF-8 support would also be nice, though not as important as IPv6 for me at the moment.

Ray

I believe there are other Windows clients with ipv6 support, if that's what's most impotant to you. A lot of people prefer mIRC's interface, though.

I have tried XChat which I didn't get on with at all. Most other packages that support IPv6 are command line Linux ports. They often rely on Cygwin which has poor IPv6 support, though it is probably good enough for basic IRC.

I am keen to see IPv6 support implemented in mIRC as it is the most popular IRC software and so it would have the greatest effect in getting the IRC community prepared for IPv6.

I agree. I never use mIRC at home, but seeing as it's the Internet Explorer of IRC, I think it's important for new features to find their way into mIRC in order for them to be a success at all.

damn! now I'll have to find another IRC client!