You’d quit IRC because your client supported streaming video?! That’s totally pathetic. You obviously missed my entire point.

There are some non-mainstream clients that *are* getting closer to what I’m talking about and yes, they have stronger scripting support than mIRC.

I can see now as years before, those that know don’t care or are obtuse. I’m done with the topic.

I completely disagree with your views of why mIRC is popular. It does have a simple, clean interface for sure. However, many mIRC users like myself hate the fact that it hasn’t changed except the icons and a few other changes in 4 versions. Users have used scripts and dlls to change what they could on mIRC and have for years. No, not everyone needs a memoserv GUI, but can you honestly name 5 people you know that actually like typing out memoserv commands? I’d bet not. If people really enjoyed command line we’d all be checking our email with pine. mIRC scripts and popups to help interface with memoserv have existed for nearly as long as memoserv it’s self. mIRC also retains users not solely because of it’s interface, but because many existing users, myself included, are not interested in learning yet another client. So they suffer through until they no longer care about IRC and more on.

It’s my opinion that Eggdrop is popular because of it’s already existing features that were one of a kind and revolutionary that have existed for many years. for example the partyline, full 24/7 existence is extremely important on services less networks like EFnet .. etc. It’s not the tcl scripting interface that made the bot popular, the vast majority of IRC users do not even know how to script and I’d wager that even more don’t even care. They rely on the few that do know and care to write the scripts for them.

You guys have been doing an awesome job at keeping up with the newer daemon features and modes! Eggdrop has come a long way for what it does do. I’ll concede to the point that Eggdrop should be more user friendly simply because its a userless application, by that I mean it’s designed to be an automated process and not an user application that directly interacts with users.

Unicode support is nowadays pretty much a requirement. Your convenience of being a native latin user is probably making you underestimate it’s importance. Speaking of ‘everyone’, maybe everyone should be able to communicate in IRC using his own language and alphabet – a thing you are taking as granted. That said, features aren’t the only criteria for choosing a client. mIRC is successful and imho the best GUI client because of it’s look and feel. Various others have raised and fallen through the years, but haven’t achieved the good ballance of functionality, usability and stability, required to make a client popular.

In addition to Unicode, IPv6 is another feature coming years late (but better than never) in mIRC. 3rd party dlls don’t count. Maybe you don’t use IPv6 and don’t care, but do you think everybody is interested in a GUI interface to MemoServ either?
Anyway, feature requests to mIRC should be directed to Khaled, but keep in mind it’s a one man’s project, so don’t be too critical.

You didn’t even mention what would you like to see in Eggdrop. If you have an idea about a feature suitable for a bot, go on and tell us. Or use our Trac system to request it. We can’t read minds, but we may implement your ideas if you share them with us.

Regarding eggdrop 1.6.20; which fixes do you call minor? The event notifier replacement is a major improvement for Tcl scripters. If you’re not one, of course you won’t be interested, but it’s scripts which make eggdrop popular. The inability to bypass or disable the queuing system has been bugging people for years now – that’s a minor but important fix. And the 64 bit BSDs fixes.. do you mean we should spend time only on features and let the bot crash on some pretty common systems, just because our resume is more important than the substance?

The rest of changes are minor but useful and certainly add for a better experience. 90% of them are in response to user reports or requests, standing for years. If you want a feature-rich release, look for 1.8.0 – we’re going to add IPv6, UTF8, SSL encryption for IRC, botnet and everywhere, gettext and whatever else users request and we could implement. So don’t complain – just visit http://trac.eggeads.org and tell us what do you consider a useful feature. This is the way to go.

My statement isn’t just a simple ranting mind you. The issue is IRC community wide. It’s all the rage these days for client authors to do bug fixes only or add things that many users care nothing about. I’m sure the russian spammers really like mIRC’s new unicode. How about something everyone can use? Streaming video? scrolling news tickers that fetch a txt file via http (like thats really hi-tech *eyeroll*). How about the ability for users to share bios/profiles? guess what, all done in the past. hardly done in the present. All completely possible on *ALL* RFC compliant ircds.

My objective is for client authors to see that no one is adding new features to their clients and users are quickly moving on to mytwitterbooks and IMs because of it.

There are a vast array of things that can be done with the current IRC Protocol especially since ctcp is so open ended. It’s rare but things like graphical smilies and streaming video support are being added to clients and it all works on current standards either by way of simple txt replacement or by using ctcp much the same way dcc works. there are long dead clients that have more user targeted features than the brand new mIRC 7.1 even has. Said clients died 12 years ago, that’s not sad .. that’s just plain pathetic.

I’m not only targeting Eggdrop, I challenge ALL clients to get off their thumbs and code us users some real, modern features that can compete with IM’s and mytwitterbooks.

Why can’t Klient of mIRC have a GUI to memoserv? mIRC had a script for DALnet’s memoserv 10 years ago, it was really nice and the client doesn’t do it now because … ?!?!?! It’s completely possible if coded with modularity. Clients have no issues reading raw 005 or CAPAB and nearly all daemons return some form of $network value so detection methods are in place already. Authors simply aren’t interested.

The technology is there, no one that can code cares, IRC is dying because of it.