Forums Feature Suggestions Spell Check

"You, Mentality, obviously have no idea what you are talking about."

That was a bit hostile.

Can you offer up any of your own opinions on this subject Mentality? You seem to think this suggetion is a waste, but the only issues you raise are easily answered quotes. I really would like to hear a good reason mIRC shouldn't have a spellchecker option...I've come up with one but I'm not sure I want to share.

The issue of rudeness has been taken up in private message, that's the end of that topic.

I don't think any suggestion is a waste, I'm grateful to all people who offer up suggestions. The points I raised, as I have said, are not my own but ones I've gathered from the other threads that talk about spell checkers. Nevertheless, I agree with many of those points and whilst I don't think the person who posted has wasted their time, and I have no idea what Khaled's feelings are about the issue, I don't personally agree with having a spell checker put into mIRC.

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.

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?

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.

This seems like another IM client suggestion like the smileys were. mIRC isn't an IM client, if you really want it to be there are DLLs and addons out there that you can use to bring those features in.

IRC is written communication indeed, but it is not formal. You don't have to type a formal essay every time you speak. I don't see this improving the quality of chat and I don't see this improving the quality of spelling for those that really need it. I mean really, the only 'illiterate' people I come across are people from countries such as Kuwait or Malaysia that have a lot of difficulty speaking English - they aren't going to benefit from a spell checker as more often than not most humans can't work out what some people are saying, let alone a dictionary that hasn't got a brain!

My 2 cents.

Regards,

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.



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.



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.



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?

Select them from where? The installation dialog? You expect that to list 200+ languages and for a user to find their specific one? Perhaps select them from a drop down list....and then how many drop down lists should be available to choose from in the case of someone wanting to install multiple dictionaries?

And erm, since when has mIRC ever asked for feature settings in the installation dialog. Bah.



Just disable it? But what about people who WANT the feature, but don't want it to affect certain words but can't be bothered to add 100 words to the dictionary? Just disabling the dictionary if it were implemented is hardly an option. I don't see many threads on this board saying 'Oh well, you're having difficulties with that option so just switch it off'.



Words in different languages could quite easily conflict. 'Salut' in French may be interpreted by an English dictionary as 'Salute'. How should the dictionaries react? Is the person meaning to say 'Salut' in French of have they spelt 'Salute' incorrectly? Perhaps they should just disable the feature



I would say most people couldn't care less. If it's intelligible then there isn't really an issue, is there? If it's not intelligible chances are a spell checker is not going to help the person. Why should such a major feature be incorporated for what I would say is the minority of IRCers who are so pedantic they think 'pls' is the end of TEH world.



Read the last 2 paragraphs in my last post which are still the icing on the cake for me, even if every problem above is answered to its full extent.

Regards,

Select from the mIRC options. The list of languages could be presented in a list box that allows for multiple items to be selected. Never said anything about the mIRC installer...



Yes. Why not?
People do it for their word processors, people do it on websites which ask your geographical location when you register for whatever service that site provide and there's probably numerous other places too where this happens. Why should it be such a problem for mIRC users to pick their languages from an alphabetically-sorted list? Are people so inept that they can't handle that?



Well what possibilities are there? Let's see:
1) Add the word to the dictionary via a text field in the mIRC options desiged for this purpose.
2) Don't add the word to the dictionary and live with the fact the occasional word gets turned red in your text box before you send out the line of text. If this is the desired choice, don't moan about it because you're too lazy to amend your dictionary via the mIRC options.
3) Disable the spell checker.



Since the word is in one of the dictionaries, it wouldn't respond. In such a sitution, you'd have to use your own personal judgement.



But the whole point of the spell checker is to check YOUR spelling, not other peoples. Why would you yourself be writing unintelligable words?!



Another advantage to a spell checker (which my friend brought up) is that it possibly could be advantageous to those who may be learning another language and would like to be able to communicate with it effectively. And please don't snipe at me. I'm not pedantic and I certainly don't see 'plz' as the end of the world. I just prefer my own personal text to be perfectly legible.



You've not really outlined any serious problems that could not be answered with a little bit of serious thought. I still see no good reason why this cannot be added besides the "it's too IM-like" complaint.

Although those issues still haven't been answered to their full extent I really can't be bothered to fill another thread up with 5 pages of useless answering back. So, just to quote the last part:



Firstly, I still see no reason why it should be incorporated just a bunch of reasons how it could be. Secondly, the final paragraph of the post I referred you to mentions nothing of an IM client. The final paragraph contains a reason as to why I see little or no point in having this dictionary.

TBH, if it was included (provided it was off by default) I wouldn't care a great deal I just don't think such a thing belongs in an IRC client. If the original argument is taken, that being "I'm sick of correcting typos", as I've said, a spell checker isn't going to help any.

Regards,

Yes, some people love accuracy and correctness - and they learn to type. Millions of foreigners can do it; why wouldn't a native be able to speak and type in his own language perfectly (or at least with one mistake every 1,000 words, for example)? The ones who can't tell the difference between "mandatory" and "manditory" won't care if their typing is right or wrong. Writing a built-in spell checker for a communication environment based on getting the message through quickly while disregarding quality, is simply a waste of human resources. You should use a spell checker for your work, for writing your resume, for academic work, even if you know that you make one mistake in 100,000 words. The fact that people created add-ons for mIRC to turn it into an e-mail checker or multimedia player is simply an example of the power of the scripting language. If one feels like it, he could write a mIRC script to replace the industrial computers controlling the robots in a car factory. This doesn't mean that such a feature is normal for an IRC client. Neither is e-mail checking and multimedia players, there are specialized tools for that.

Extending this application beyond its scope will only turn it into a strange piece of software, like mixing up the genes of a sheep, a shark, a parrot and a cactus just to see what could come up. It is silly to request users to use correct language on IRC, even that some people would very much like to see those abbreviations or nonsense gone from their screens (me included). However, it is stupid to force users to do so - see how much you can determine people not to use excessive colors in channels. And, it is a waste of time to implement something that is not desired or needed by the majority of the users; there are other things on the "to do" list, which have more supporters than the idea of a spell checker.

Remember what happened when Khaled decided to change the "nag screen" on start-up from being displayed once every 30 days to being displayed on each start-up, if the user didn't enter a valid license key. People gave up the improvements and bugs fixed because all they understood was that "I have to pay for the new version, the old one is free." The Options entry moved from the File menu to Tools menu was an annoyance to many people, and so were other minor changes between versions. What would happen if people found out the new version prevents them from sending messages as they did for years, or annoys them with underlined words they mistyped, or even makes chatting feel like writing a document for work? They use IRC to chat free of any restraints, to express themselves creatively, to relax. Throw in a restriction which directly affects the purpose of chatting, and you've got a serious problem.

No offense intended, just speaking my mind.

Mentality: The reason it should be incorporated is pretty self-explanitory, isn't it? To point out spelling errors.

Also, it is correct the final paragraph of your last-but-one post didn't mention IM at all. I am aware of this. However, you did reference IM clients in the post before that.

Puterfixer:



As I've stated before, the spell checker would not be restrictive. It would merely, if enabled, highlight a misspelled word in red in the editbox before you send it out to channel. That is all it does. People seem to get so wound up over the smallest of things *rolls eyes*

Here is a graphical demonstration. Would this really be such a bad thing?

What I am saying is, what benefit is gained from pointing out spelling errors? (Re: below)

The post I referred to did mention IM clients but the second paragraph said the following:

"I don't see this improving the quality of chat and I don't see this improving the quality of spelling for those that really need it. I mean really, the only 'illiterate' people I come across are people from countries such as Kuwait or Malaysia that have a lot of difficulty speaking English - they aren't going to benefit from a spell checker as more often than not most humans can't work out what some people are saying, let alone a dictionary that hasn't got a brain!"

Are you telling me you really think having a spell checker will improve the quality of people's typing? How is a dictionary supposed to help someone who says: "Hai how r u? a/s/l?" or "lolzy 10x". These are the kind of people that are unbearable to talk with. I hardly think it's necessary to start incorporating something like this for someone who, using puterfixer's example, spells mandatory 'manditory'. That doesn't improve anything. It's not worth it, there are far more important features to be working on in my opinion.

Anyway, that's enough of my contributions to this thread heh, I guess Khaled has got both sides of the 'story' as it were, we'll see in future versions to come I guess :-)

Regards,

Our opinions are different, each person has its own preferences, which is understandable. Let's try to look at this discussion from an objective point of view. Before starting any project, it's a good idea to run a fesability study to understand what is the ratio between the work involved in it and its final usefulness. Has anyone conducted a thorough research on several IRC networks, to see how many people would be interested in using this feature and how many do not find it necessary? I doubt Khaled will be willing to dedicate a few weeks to this enhancement when only .5% of mIRC users will keep it activated. If there are no studies to indicate that such a feature is likely to be used by a lot of people, then it's pointless to get it started.

Mentality:



Unless I have missed something, this is precisely the reason for a spell checker.



Of course it will. If you are in doubt of this, please disable the spell checker in your word processor and see how well you get on.

Puterfixer:

A feasability study? I don't fancy surveying all of the mIRC users on every IRC network. However, I do believe polls can be created in this forum - but that's in the hands of the moderators.

Yes, if people do not know that the way they spell a word is wrong, how will they ever know to change it. Believe it or not, IRC is one of the best ways to learn how to type properly. Unfortunately, it is one of the best ways to learn to type poorly as well. If people, both new to IRC, and people who have been using it since the Dark Ages, start to increase their typing accuracy, it will be beneficial to them (the user), for obvious reasons.



The person who spells mandatory 'manditory' will have learned something from his IRC client, instead of letting his brain rot away on the Internet.



Can you name any that aren't related to scripting. Personally, I don't make scripts in mIRC. I actually use it as a chat client. I would like to see features that benefit me, as the non-scripter user, when new versions are released. (Yes, i do hang out in #mircscripts.org, but no, I seriously don't script)

edit: Furthermore, this would actually be a selling point for me to buy mIRC. It's one thing that no other client I know of, besides one I am in the proccess of building in phpgtk, incorporates.

Before I respond to puterfixer's post, I have a theory on what has turned this thread into such a spat war. This suggestion is a Spell Checker, not a Spell Fixer. In my opinion, the best way that this could be implemented is if it:

1. was able to be toggled on and off. This would have to be the case, as everyone would not want to download and install aspell with their native dictionary.
2. could use multiple dictionaries at the same time, for people chat in both English, and Spanish for example. I am not sure if aspell supports multiple dictionaries, so maybe an option to turn aspell off for certain channels, like you can turn logging off for certain channels.
3. did not fix your spelling automatically for you.
4. did not popup any spelling suggestions
5. had a way to change the formatting of a mispelled word. instead of turning it red and underlined, maybe turn it bold.
6. had an easy way to add words to the dictionary. I would suggest actually adding it to mirc.ini as not to 'corrupt' the dictionary with mispelled words, like lol, rofl, etc.

Furthermore, I do not think it would actually take too much work to implement this. Since aspell/pspell is open source, there is many references to learn from, if need be. I know in other languages, this could be done in a matter of a few lines of code. Of course, this is just my view on it, I really have no idea since I am not familiar with C++, or the mIRC source code obviously. But since Mr. Mardam-Bey recently added the 'multi-byte' edit box, the text formatting for a mispelled word would not be a problem I do not imagine. Now to reply to puterfixer...



IRC was not based on getting a message through quickly while disregarding quality. IRC, along with email, which I despise, has become a means of communication where spelling and grammar (thus quality) is, for some reason, forgotten. How annoying is it when someone sends you an email that is completely void of any punctuation, thus turning it into one long run-on sentence?




Now I'm really not sure what you were trying to get at, but I do not think adding a spell validator to a program in which is used for typing is really that far fetched.



How you type on IRC portrays an enormous amount about yourself. The people that this wouldn't help out are the people who mispell words on purpose, but then again, there is nothing that could help them out.



No one is being forced to type correctly. This would be a non-intrusive spell checker. So non-intrusive, that, from what has been suggested by myself and others, shouldn't even offer suggestions. All it does is notify you of mispelled words with some sort of text-formatting in the editbox whilst you type.



I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who would think it'd be a good idea. I do not keep up to date with the "to-do" list, but I imagine the "to-do" list is filled with things to benefit scripters, not people like me who use mIRC solely to chat with.



This would in no way prevent anyone from sending messages with mispelled words. If for some reason you found you did not want mIRC to notify you of mispelled words, simply turn it off. Furthermore, people would not "just find out" as soon as they opened mIRC that it "annoys" them with mispelled words. They would have to go to aspell.net and download aspell and their dictionary. This feature would not work without them.



Not all people use IRC to relax, some actually do business with it. Some people actually use it to learn. When I join a help channel requesting help with something, php for example, I do my best to organize my thoughts, including spelling and grammar, cleanly and efficiently. People, including myself, would much rather help someone who sounds professional than someone who enters a channel and immediately starts spewing out jibberish.



Remember, there would be a way to turn it on and off. And also if they didn't want a spellchecker, they probably wouldn't have downloaded the dictionary.

These are my thoughts on the matter, and coupled with Jundas and DekuHaze make a rather convincing argument in my opinion on why this is a good suggestion. Basically, I have come to the conclusion that, if you do not want mIRC to check your spelling, don't enable, or disable the option, or don't even download the dictionaries, and you have nothing to worry about.

People, including myself, would much rather help someone who sounds professional than someone who enters a channel and immediately starts spewing out jibberish.

I am indifferent to it all. I am yet to enter a room and find that the conversation is totally compliant with English as Shakespeare knew it. I think overuse of 'netspeak' is un-necessary but at the same time it doesn't kill anyone. It's a matter of to each their own.

The other thing is that a spellchecker is often also the spellfixer, as per many word processing programmes.

Blah: I nearly forgot too, there is no such thing as a dictionary that caters for every language. There's hundreds of languages in the world with tens of thousands of dialects. It'd take hundreds of years to account for them all, even if they could all be understood by the authors of the dictionaries.

There's approximately 6000-7000 languages (including dialects) thoughout the world. Yet, I couldn't imagine there being more than 22 languages spoken a considerable amount on IRC. 99.999% of the people that chat on IRC chat in one of the following 22 or so languages. I can almost guarantee you that. People in the middle of the Sahara desert, that speak some strange tongue of clicks and snaps, simply do not have computers. Below is a list of the dictionaries aspell has on their website compiled for win32, there are others that could be compiled for win32 also I think. I tried to think of languages that aren't there to no success.

Breton | Catalan | Czech | Welsh | Danish | German | Greek | English | Esperanto | Spanish | Faroese | French | Italian | Dutch | Norwegian | Polish | Portuguese | Romanian | Russian | Slovak | Swedish | Ukrainian

There's 18 different versions of English in Windows and more notably, Office. Does Aspell cater for all of them? If not then you may then understand why I posted my original remarks near the top of the thread.

The format of the english dict directory is as follows:


There's a total of 158,030 words in it, ranging from canadian english with accents to british without accents. Just because 34 people may find one word that isn't in the dictionary, doesn't mean that this isn't a worthy idea. If your thoughts were along the lines of, "It's not perfect, there'd be a few words left out", then you need to seriously reconsider every suggestion put forth in this forum. There will always be a few people you can't please. But in my honest opnion, 99.99% of the people who would use this, would get satisfactory results.

Furthermore, the tech savvy, or people who don't mind reading a put, can import their own word lists they mind find scattered here and there throughout the Internet if 158,030 isn't enough for them.

Also, one last point before it gets brought up, yes, the other language dictionaries are just as long. Actually they're longer. The English aspell dictionary was 2.3MB, whereas for example, the Spanish one is 7.0MB, and the Ukranian one is 12.0MB, while the Italian one is just 770k.

Turning a feature on or off is not a problem to me. I've learned to use mIRC's options to suit my needs, to shape this client to the way I like it. However, for many others, an insignifiant change has a very strong impact; see the last paragraph in my first reply on this thread. That is my whole point: how many people would appreciate the new feature and try to learn to benefit from it, versus how many people will delete the new mIRC and keep the old one because it is simpler to delete than reading the documentation.

The spell checker could eventually become like the agent support; most users don't even know it's there, but the few who really find it useful will appreciate it exists. I am only concerned that, a) implementing this feature will take a lot of time and might not be justified by the number of users who will take advangate of it, and b) if things are not implemented properly (as in, the spell checker to be disabled by default), people will find it difficult to adapt to the new version.

Off-topic question: is it possible to add a spell checker in the form of an agent?

From what I've seen, most people are not going to learn anything on IRC, and especially will disregard their own typing. "What is this, English class? Get a life. It's IRC!" - I've been told more than once. People are so lazy that they will type "thx" instead of "thanks", thinking that saving 3 keystrokes has the excuse that everybody is using it. Allow me to be pessimistic about the success of the spell checker.

By the way, another thing I hate, apart from chopped words and nonsense sentences, is when others abuse the Quote function of the forum, to disect a message in tiny pieces taken out of context, then argue against them one by one.

Remember, this is simply a collection of opinions regarding a development suggestion, not an argument to prove the others wrong. If you want to be helpful, move on from "you can turn it off" answer which has been repeated too many times; find arguments to support your ideas. In the end, it's up to Khaled if he implements the spell checker or not; we're here to help him find the best way to approach this feature suggestion.

I have to agree that improvements to the scripting language shouldn't take that much of a priority; latest versions mostly fixed identifiers and other script-related bugs. I'd like to see other changes as well, features available to the user without the need of a script. This thread is not the place to enumerate them.

You could use a halted on TABCOMP, with an aspell library (dll?)...

That's be nice to see, then it doesn't need to even be added into mIRC by default...

You mean like this?