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I suggest that UTF-8 display & encoding is made the default for all channels & queries.

I know I've suggested this before, but really, without it there will not be an end to people's confusion about why some characters don't work and why some do. It's unreasonable to expect people to figure this all out for themselves, when making UTF-8 the default would rid the world of character set problems forever and prevent a lot of frankly unnecessary confusion.

There's IMHO no longer any need to cater for the very small minority of IRC clients still stuck in the 90's in terms of Unicode support. Please make it the default already.

(Although I don't recommend it before this bug is fixed.. ;-)
I'd like to see it happen. But I suspect that before it can be implemented it would be necessary for the scripting language to handle UTF-8 encoded text in some way. Currently there's no real support for UTF-8 at all besides the $isutf(), $utfencode(), and $utfdecode() identifiers (none of which are documented outside of versions.txt). Without scripting language support for it I can see everyone using UTF-8 as kicking off a whole slew of script-related problems.

Of course adding that kind of feature across the whole scripting language sounds like a pretty massive challenge in itself, so I don't think it's going to happen in the short-term. Some day though, hopefully...
I'm not advocating going backwards in time here, but mIRC does not "cater" to an IRC client-- mIRC *is* the IRC client.. There is still a very large (potentially majority in size) group of people who still use various ANSI encodings over IRC... you could say mIRC is catering to that. This groups is by no means a "very small" minority, even if it was not the technical majority. My viewpoint may be skewed, but I personally have yet to take part in an IRC discussion involving Unicode encoded characters other than ornamental symbols.

That said, a transition will happen. Keep in mind that while Unicode is a good decade old, Unicode support on the web (the web being a pretty large sample size for "the internet" as a whole) has really only begun to take off in the last 2-3 years. Unicode is definitely not a "90's" thing... mIRC is not as far behind as some make it seem... it's just taking a little long to catch up.
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