The ability to have pictures in regular windows would be really cool.

Perhaps mIRC could download and place a picture into a normal text window. ex: [img]http://www.blah.com/blah.jpg[img]

some sort of "mIRC DCC link" could be used as well. ex: [img]DCC://c:/pictures/blah.jpg[img] (what that'll do is request the file "blah.jpg" from the person who said the link, download it if the transfer is successful and display it in place of "[img]DCC://c:/pictures/blah.jpg[img]". )

If <a href="DCC://c:/pictures/blah.jpg" target="_blank">DCC://c:/pictures/blah.jpg</a> were to be said in the channel, it would simply be a link that someone could click on to automatically make their mIRC client request that file from that person. (this would make sending files, such as pictures, to multiple people a lot lot easier )

Perhaps allowing the nickname to be set, for the DCC:// type link, (with some security set) would be good too, such as.. <a href="DCC://nickname:1234567@c:/pictures/blah.jpg" target="_blank">DCC://nickname:1234567@c:/pictures/blah.jpg</a>

What that will be is, you have your mIRC generate an "allow list" with a corresponding number to the file, so someone can't just put <a href="DCC://nickname@c:/windows/whatever.log" target="_blank">DCC://nickname@c:/windows/whatever.log</a> to download whatever they want from the person. The number would have to correspond to an allowed file. The number would be randomly generated, and only files or files within directories that were specified to be allowed for downloading would be transfered.

(the request of a file would be done via direct connect in the background, running on DCC ports, of course. It would not trigger by a msg over IRC or a visible DCC connection)

Hmm let's have a one-click way of downloading a potentially dangerous file...

Not a good idea.

Such messages also reduce the amount of text that can be placed on a line.

IRC server set limits, on how long a line of text can be. Imagine this used for smilies, and the ammout of people that go excessive on how they use them.

THis would also mean more backend processing, to display such images. This could lead to a DOS attack, when flooded with requests.

I would image somthing like an aditional control character, and a single (restricted length, with no spaces) word or number, with another character to end it. On top, a setting in mirc, that resticts the amount that are processed per line of text (default 2?).

Image are then picked from a config specified directory, and the image must only be BMP.

While a more secure solution, I still hate the idea.