Latest News

mIRC reaches 150 million downloads milestone! (February 11^th 2008)

At a rate of forty to fifty thousand downloads per day from the mIRC website, it turns out that mIRC has been downloaded over 150 million times, and that's without taking account of downloads from other sites around the world. That's a pretty remarkable figure.

What makes this even more eye-opening is that mIRC is still being downloaded about as much as it ever has been, although the demographics have changed somewhat - the largest number of mIRC users are still in the United States and Europe - but the fastest growth of users is in South America and Asia where a whole new generation of users seems to be discovering IRC.

In many ways, the fact that mIRC is still here is a testament to the resilience of IRC as a technology and to the people, from developers to administrators to users, that keep IRC alive and well.

mIRC will be twelve years old later this month, so we'd like to send out a big thanks to the IRC community for your support, trust, and enthusiasm over the years!

mIRC 6.31 has been released! (November 1^st 2007)

In addition to the visual changes in mIRC and the website, this new version of mIRC also addresses the various issues that were reported for the last release.

For scripters, we hope you like the changes to the script editor. The interface has been improved, it is now cleaner and easier to read, we added Check Bracket/Sort Variables items to Edit menu, line numbers to the margin, and enter/home key indentation support. The editor also no longer flickers when resized.

Various other changes include:

• A "Hide tips when locked" option to the lock dialog,
• An SSL option to automatically accept invalid certificates,
• Tips now shade each alternate message that is added to an existing tip to make it easier to distinguish individual messages,
• When bars are locked the drag bars are now hidden from view,
• Changed behaviour of "Hide minimized desktop windows" option so that query, message, and chat windows remain visible when they are first opened minimized on the desktop.

In total there have been over 50 changes to this version and although most of them are only small fixes and tweaks, we hope that they result in a more useful and stable mIRC for you.

mIRC 6.3 has been released! (August 16^th 2007)

mIRC 6.3 fixes some buggy that made it stick to using a secure port if the last connection was a secure one. And when connecting to an ip address from a round robin dns pool, the original connect address is now remembered and the connect message now has "dns pool" appended to it. By popular request Khaled changed the logging method back to the simple plain old method, so mIRC no longer uses the name.N.log filename format. Also a reload logs bug where mIRC was loading logs in wrong order is fixed.

Various other changes include:

• Full Vista compatability, among others, means that new installations of mIRC now save all settings in the User's "Application Data\mIRC" folder by default. However, if the installer or mIRC find an old installation with a mirc.ini in the same folder as mirc.exe they will use the mirc.exe folder for all settings. If you are installing a new mIRC over an old version you should see no change in behaviour. The installer is now also aware of administrator and standard user accounts and installs mIRC accordingly. Under an Administrator account, the installer will create icons for "All Users". Under a Standard account, it will create icons only for the current user. When run under Vista mIRC now checks for a corresponding virtual store folder at startup. Vista creates virtual store folders for older non-Vista compatible applications, such as older versions of mIRC. If mIRC finds such a folder, it displays a dialog box allowing you to retrieve your old mIRC files and settings.

• With the U3 support in mIRC we should be able to make an U3 package available for mIRC with which you can take your mIRC wherever you want! U3 is a specification for applications to run from portable storage devices (ie. flash drives) without leaving any settings/traces on the host system. Look on U3.com for more info.

• The support for traytips can be used to notify you of various events such as incoming messages or users in your notify list coming on or leaving IRC. The tips only appear when mIRC is not the active application and are hidden the moment mIRC becomes active. Tips can be fully configured and scripted to show exactly what you want, even in combination with mIRC's highlight function. and of course you can completely disable the tips ;-)

mIRC 6.21 has been released! (November 23^rd 2006)

The mIRC installer has improved a lot! The installer now offers several pre-defined modes that allow you to choose between an Upgrade, Full or Custom install. It ensures that backups of old files are successful, reports error and aborts the installation if it failed for some reason.

The IRC Servers dialog now uses a treeview to display the servers list. In response to this change the format of the servers.ini file has changed to accomodate for a larger amount of servers. The DNS routines have changed so that on connect the retrieved pool of IP addresses is randomised to spread the load across connections.

Preparing for a fully Vista (the new Windows) compliant version of mIRC several changes have been made. These include minor cosmetic issues, icons, a new help file in .chm format, etc. Also a command line option has been created that makes mIRC avoid all use of the registry. If this switch is used, mIRC stores registry information in the mirc.ini file in a [user] section, and does not modify registry to support irc:// links etc. This comes handy when you want to run mIRC from a memory stick or similar device.

A lot of changes have been made to the way mIRC names and stores logfiles. This is mainly done to prevent file corruption and loss of data when you open multiple server connections. mIRC tries to name and rename logfiles as smart as possible. Also, when settings are changed in the logging dialog, the logging state of windows and any open log filenames are now immediately updated to reflect the new settings. In previous versions new settings were only applied when a new window was created.

We hope to have smashed the confusing 'flash' and 'beep' options by adding a "Default" menu item to System Menu Flash/Beep items, allowing channel/query/chat windows to use the default settings as set in the Options/Sounds dialog. And disabling sounds in the Sounds dialog now does actually disable -all- sounds, even those using /splay or /beep. ;-)

For experienced users and scripting enthusiasts this new version has heaps of fixes, changes and other little thingies to play with. Some of the more useful changes for scripters are: an extension to the /toolbar command that allows you to customize your toolbar, it now has a new switch that makes mIRC remember your current toolbar settings and reload them automatically the next time you run mIRC; the /window -h behaviour has been fixed so that you can hide Status windows from the switchbar; the on WAVEEND event now triggers as it should; Regular expression support has been improved and resolves gpf and speed issues in the previous version; script $error handling should work better now; and /drawrot is now much faster. We encourage you to explore the versions.txt file for all changes. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work.

In total there have been over 80 changes in this version and although most of them are bug fixes or small tweaks, we hope that they result in a more useful and stable mIRC for you.

mIRC 6.2 has been released! (July 28^th 2006)

mIRC's default toolbar is now customizable through a /toolbar command. You can add, move and delete buttons, add your own icons, and of course, attach your own commands to them.

By popular demand also a treebar has been added. This lists network connections with channels, queries and other open windows, much like the switchbar. It behaves like the switchbar in many ways as well. You can expand and collapse trees, just like you would expect. Right-clicking on an item pops up the usual menu for that window. Right-clicking in an empty area of the treebar pops up a menu with various display options. The treebar width can be set by dragging the border with the mouse, and jsut as with virtually all other windows the background and text colors can be set in the colors dialog. Just like the toolbar the treebar can be repositioned to the top/bottom/left/right of the main mIRC window!

In this version several UTF-8 related bugs are fixed, including bugs with text wrapping and copy/pasting from UTF-8 "display" or "encode" enabled windows, and bugs relating to the order in which SJIS/JIS and UTF-8 encodings are applied. Much more important is that UTF-8 support has been greatly enhanced in this version of mIRC to allow people all over the world to chat in their own languages, with their own fonts, with a lot less hassle then ever before. To do so support for font substitution/font linking has been added. This allows mIRC to display all characters needed, regardless of the font you are using, assuming you have the required fonts on your system, somewhere. mIRC will try to match font sizes etc. To speed up the process Khaled has implemented his own caching routines to enable fast font/character referencing.

Various other changes include:

• better support of XP and classic themes,
• faster re-wrapping of text,
• a fix for various $regsubex() and $regsub() parsing bugs, for a flood protection bug, some agent speech bug, and for a bug with the find dialog in desktop windows,
• and mIRC now stores servers that were connected to successfully to prioritize future server connection attempts, ...and a lot more.

You'll have to dig through the help file in mIRC and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work.

May we invite you to visit the Message Board on the website with all questions you might have? The board offers great help with everything related to mIRC! Thanks for using mIRC, lots of fun on IRC.

mIRC 6.17 has been released! (February 17^th 2006)

The Fonts dialog also has an "Encode" option that encodes outgoing text in UTF-8 based on the script/codepage selected for that window. The Encode feature is selective, ie. it only encodes the parts of an outgoing message that are not already in UTF-8 format. It also takes into account if the IRC server is fully UTF-8 enabled or not.
Various other changes:

• mIRC now has a 'check for timed out connections' option in connect/options dialog. When this is set mIRC pings the server every so often if it hasn't heard from the server for a while to test your connection.
• Support for initiating passive dcc send/chat connections has been added.
• Changing the default font for a window type now affects all open windows of the same type immediately.
• Most file dialogs are now resizable.
• You can disable the $decode identifier (and various other "dangerous" commands) in the Lock options dialog. (The $decode is of course disabled by default.)
• Lots of SSL things have improved and mIRC now also supports SSL connections for sockets

New collection of IRC servers (February 8^th 2006)

Updating mIRC's servers.ini file

New collection of IRC servers (August 15^th 2005)

New collection of IRC servers (April 13^th 2005)

mIRC: a decade of chat! (February 28^th 2005)

In the early years of IRC, IRC was mostly limited to technical users, people who used non-graphical, command-line IRC clients such as ircii, and who had a fairly intricate knowledge of how IRC and the Internet worked. mIRC was designed with one purpose in mind: to make the basics of IRC accessible to as many people as possible, while at the same time retaining the technical aspects which so many others enjoyed. Nowadays, mIRC and IRC are used by millions of people from all walks of life.

Thanks to everyone in the IRC community who has played a part in keeping mIRC and IRC going over the last ten years. Happy tenth Birthday, mIRC :-)

You can learn more about the history of mIRC in Khaled's faq on his website.

New collection of IRC servers (December 21^st 2004)

New collection of IRC servers (December 10^th 2004)

Charity appeal: HIV/AIDS in the Developing World (November 6th 2004 - updated December 6th 2004) Thanks to all of the mIRC users who registered their copies of mIRC between November 6th and December 6th to support our appeal, 100% of your registration has been donated to Médecins Sans Frontières for use in their HIV/AIDS prevention and ARV treatment programmes around the world. 2301 mIRC users registered, raising a total of $46,020.00. Many thanks to everyone who helped out! The appeal is over, however if you still have any questions about it please email Khaled or Médecins Sans Frontières.

New collection of IRC servers (October 28^th 2004)

New collection of IRC servers (September 11^th 2004)

mIRC 6.16 has been released! (July 7^th 2004)

Charity appeal: emergency aid for Western Sudan refugees (May 12th 2004 - updated June 12th 2004) Thanks to all of the mIRC users who registered their copies of mIRC between May 12th and June 12th to support our appeal, 100% of your registration has been donated to Médecins Sans Frontières for use in their emergency medical programmes in Darfur, Western Sudan. 2633 mIRC users registered, raising a total of $52,660.00. Many thanks to everyone who helped out! The appeal is over, however if you still have any questions about it please email Khaled or Médecins Sans Frontières.

mIRC 6.15 has been released! (June 3^rd 2004)

Various other changes include:

• SJIS/JIS support and various multi-byte display/mark/copy issues have improved,
• the 'reload' logs feature has improved to make sure it reloads the correct log files,
• support for SSL has improved to make sure mIRC always uses an SSL port when reconnecting if it was using one in the prior connection, and some issues with SSL key files and SSL root certificates have been solved,
• a small memory leak has been plugged, port selection for DCC and other connections works more smoothly, and issues with random port selection, the /fserve maxgets limit, and DCC Get via http proxy/socks are solved.

New collection of IRC servers (April 16^th 2004)

mIRC 6.14 has been released! (March 3^rd 2004)

While we tried to focus on fixing things, of course some new features and functions have been added. Although some of these new things, like the SSL support, might have to mature a bit over the next versions, we think it is fun to play with them already! A few items I'd like to mention as useful changes:

• Lots of work has been done on the support of multi-byte character encodings and the sjis-jis support. Khaled has added a "Multibyte editbox" option to the Messages dialog, which makes mIRC use a richedit editbox in all mIRC Windows for entering text. mIRC was using the standard Windows editbox before. The richedit editbox displays complex scripts properly. The Sjis/Jis and Multibyte options are now automatically enabled if mIRC detects a Multibyte version of Windows the first time mIRC is run. Khaled also fixed various multi-byte display/mark/copy bugs and improved sjis-jis support.
• An option to 'reload' logs has been added to the /IRC/Logging/ dialog. It will make mIRC load the tail of a logfile into your channel and chat windows. Seems to work fine. However, various line attributes, such as color, are not (yet) saved in the log files, so the reloaded log is displayed in the normal text color.
• Support for SSL has been added. You'll have to download some DLL's of OpenSSL 0.9.7c separately from mIRC and place them in the mIRC folder for this to work. mIRC will load the dll's automatically if it finds them, after which you can initiate a secure connection to an SSL capable IRC server. SSL settings can be found in the Connect/Options dialog, and are visible only when openssl dlls are loaded. Read more on http://www.mirc.co.uk/ssl.html.
• A Sort dialog has been added to the Window Menu. It allows you to specify the sort order of Switchbar buttons and Window types. Buttons are always sorted into groups. With the /View/Options/Display/ sort option turned off, Switchbar buttons are sorted according to creation time within groups as opposed to alphabetical sorting.
• By popular request Query/Chat windows now remember their individual font settings. We also
  - moved the port range options, which now applies to all connections, to a /Connect/Advanced/ dialog,
  - added a /cnick -sN switch, sorts item into Nth position,
  - made the switchbar to allow up to eight lines in height and displays scroll buttons when it is vertical,
  - fixed $com() dispatch pointers bug,
  - added an :error goto point, by which script errors can be caught, and
  - improved the find dialog in the script editor a lot.

Happy Birthday, mIRC! :-) (February 28^th 2004)

New collection of IRC servers (February 25^th 2004)

New collection of IRC servers (January 19^th 2004)

Charity appeal: child vaccinations across Africa (November 20th 2003 - updated December 20th 2003) Thanks to all of the mIRC users who registered their copies of mIRC between November 20th and December 20th to support our appeal, 100% of your registration has been donated to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for use in their measles campaign in Africa. 2826 mIRC users registered, raising a total of $55,230.00. Many thanks to everyone who helped out! The appeal is over, however if you still have any questions about it please email Khaled or the Red Cross.

New collection of IRC servers (December 13^th 2003)

New collection of IRC servers (November 8^th 2003)

FTP Servers needed (October 15^th 2003)

mIRC 6.12 has been released! (October 13^th 2003)

If you have questions about this new version, may we invite you to the message board on mIRC's website? These discussion forums offer great help with everything related to mIRC and its features.

mIRC 6.11 has been released! (October 10^th 2003)

A channel folders join bug where mIRC wasn't setting focus on a channel window properly was fixed, as well as a a small problem with the red dot in remote toolbar button, bugs with binary variables, duplicate separators in popup menus and a menu handling bug that affected the favorites popup menu as well as various other menus under Windows 95 and NT. Over 40 thingies, all fixed :)

While we tried to focus on fixing things, of course some new features and functions have been added. Among them:

• the language selection option that has been added to the MS Agent speech dialog. You must of course have the required language component installed. Read more on http://www.mirc.co.uk/agents.html,
• the Favorites folder that now allows multiple selection. You can now join multiple channels, or folders with channels!, at a time,
• a nifty new feature that has been added to allow you to auto-hide the list with nicknames in a channel. See the nick list options in the System Menu of each channel...

New collection of IRC servers (October 7^th 2003)

mIRC 6.1 has been released! (August 29^th 2003)

Lots of things have been fixed. Like the default browser issue, a /background bug, an editor dialog bug that most likely was the cause of odd script problems, a memory bug relating to registry handling, a /whois related memory bug, a problem with background pictures, and a popup menu resources bug.

Lots of other things have improved; All Socks5 firewall error messages are now displayed correctly, double-clicking on web/ftp hotlinks now displays a warning dialog before the site is opened, and an important change was made to the way files are created, opened, read, etc. for window logging, dcc sends/gets, and the list channels dialog. The amount of files opened for logging, sends/gets, etc. is no longer limited to a maximum total of 50 or so open files. DCC commands, such as /dcc send, ignore, etc. are now also handled in the form /dccsend, /dccignore, etc. and should also allow /dccallow etc.

Khaled is now using Visual C++ .NET 7.0 to compile mIRC. This also means nicknames are sorted a bit different, nicks beginning with certain non-alphabetic characters eg. _ ' etc. are being placed above normal nicks. This appears to be the standard sorting method in Windows, which Visual C++ abides by consistently. It now applies to the whole of mIRC. Support for the .jpeg extension has been added, custom file-handling commands and identifiers which allow you to open multiple files for reading and writing. A file type ignore warning explains why a file transfer is ignored, with a direct link to the options dialog, dcc ignore section. Also a new section was added to the servers.ini file from which mIRC will select an initial network to connect to. mIRC no longer defaults to DALnet.

Lots of interface changes this time; Check out the visual styles and new buttons, dialogs, menus etc. A single toolbar button replaces the previously separated aliases, remotes and popups button. The red light is now on when any of ctcp/event/raw are enabled, and off when they are all disabled. A right-click on the toolbar button displays a most recently used files list. At first this looks a bit odd, but it will just take some getting used to. With the color scheme option you can switch between different color schemes easily.

And scripters, there is lots of fun for you; with the $ event prefix the matchtext section of a remote event definition can now contain a regular expression! Binary variables no longer have an upper limit on the number of bytes that can be stored. And $compress() and $decompress() functions have been added that compress/decompress files and binary variables. The result is raw compressed data. Khaled managed to load a multi-megabyte file into a binary variable and compress, encode and write it to a new file, and then reverse the process. Fun stuff eh!

Various other changes include:

• The "enable" sounds option in the sounds dialog now affects most sounds, including highlight, notify, window/icon flashing, etc. Sound requests and Agents still need to be enabled/disabled individually. This does not affect the use of sound-related commands in scripts.
• Pressing Control-C while marking text in a window now copies the text and cancels the mark process. It took eight years to think of that. It's all about quality you know ;)
• Remember how you can 'collapse' all windows you have opened on a network into their status window with Alt+F1? The status window switchbar button now displays the highlight state of all associated windows hidden with Alt+F1.
• Disconnecting via the file menu/toolbar/disconnect command now results in a soft disconnect, allowing any pending server info to be displayed. Incoming data will not trigger scripts, etc. during this time. Eg. if you connect to EFnet, and then disconnect, EFnet sends a "Closing Link" message to the client. Past versions of mIRC wouldn't display that since they were performing a hard disconnect.

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