[HN Gopher] mIRC 7.81
___________________________________________________________________
mIRC 7.81
Author : futurecat
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-04-17 11:34 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mirc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mirc.com)
| kelsey978126 wrote:
| I'm so sorry, forgive me but has there been a release? What
| exactly is the news here?
| thebetatester wrote:
| It appears there has. I didn't realize mIRC was even still
| being developed but by the looks of it it's actually quite
| actively developed https://www.mirc.com/news.html
| jsheard wrote:
| Someone has to keep the IRC lights on for when Discord
| inevitably runs out of money and implodes.
| echelon wrote:
| Discord makes $600M in ARR (2023) and they haven't even
| started with a real ads effort or enterprise tools yet.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Discord makes $600M in ARR
|
| Eventually they'll run out of ships to pillage, matey.
| But IRC will still be there.
| echelon wrote:
| > But IRC will still be there.
|
| IRC is a wasteland. It was once vibrant, but now it's a
| shell of what it once was.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| And what does the last R in ARR stand for again?
| switch007 wrote:
| ARR is an industry standard! It's an important metric!
| Our investors are only interested in that figure!
|
| Quick, look over there!
| blenderob wrote:
| Did you not even click on the link before commenting?
|
| Right on that page is -
|
| > mIRC v7.81 has been released.
|
| which links to https://www.mirc.com/news.html with info about
| the new release from April 9th 2025.
|
| Granted it would have been better if this post linked to
| https://www.mirc.com/news.html
|
| Can some change the link to https://www.mirc.com/news.html?
| Mods?
| skeeterbug wrote:
| To be fair, the front page news section doesn't even have a
| date next to the 7.81 release entry. I clicked it to see if
| there was a date, but at first glance the page just looked
| like a time capsule. The title of this post doesn't even
| mention the release.
| blenderob wrote:
| Fair point. The link of this post should be updated to the
| news page.
| futurecat wrote:
| yes, and this is a 30 year old software maintained by a solo
| dev. It's an incredible piece of internet history.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| WinRAR is also about to turn 30 in a few days.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| mIRC turns thirty this year also
| marsavar wrote:
| Gosh, that brings back memories! I remember having so much fun
| coding my own trivia bots in mIRC Scripting Language
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language) over 20
| years ago.
| patwolf wrote:
| Same. mIRC scripting was really what motivated me to learn to
| program. I had tinkered a little bit with BASIC before that,
| but mIRC was what kept me interested. It's one thing to write
| uninteresting "hello world" CLI apps, but mIRC scripting was
| something you and your friends could immediately interact with.
| I wonder if kids today have something similar...maybe Roblox
| scripting?
| riffraff wrote:
| yeah I think the "this is immediately useful for me" part of
| mIRC scripting was a key driver in pushing kids to learn
| programming, and it seems lost in modern times.
|
| But, perhaps, we're just not young anymore.
| diggan wrote:
| > maybe Roblox scripting
|
| That, but also Discord is basically what people use on
| computers for communication today, and Discord also has bots.
|
| Of course, you cannot just willy-nilly write your own client
| for a Discord bot without dealing with tons of hassle,
| compared to how easy it is to write something that uses the
| IRC protocol, so not sure it's the same "instant
| gratification".
| CoolCold wrote:
| Latest News
|
| mIRC 7.81 has been released! (April 9th 2025)
|
| Whoa!
| opan wrote:
| Is it still proprietary and Windows-only?
| futurecat wrote:
| it seems so, yes.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| This is something you could easily see for yourself, so this is
| certainly a rhetorical question.
|
| To which I'll respond: the world doesn't owe it to you to make
| all software usable on your operating system of choice. There's
| no freedom in that.
| diggan wrote:
| As someone who grew up on Windows + mIRC + vBulletin forums (late
| 90s, early 00s), mIRC will always ignite fond memories :)
|
| For those who still use IRC, but maybe on other platforms than
| Windows, HexChat could be considered a spiritual successor to
| mIRC, but it's also open source and available on a ton of
| platforms. Just a happy user here, not affiliated in any way.
|
| Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog
| of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago. I still use
| it without problems, but maybe people could share any active
| forks if they know about them?
| futurecat wrote:
| Halloy is a nice IRC client. Written in Rust and has a
| beautiful icon.
| xattt wrote:
| Ah yes, Rust IRC clients of the 1990s always trigger my fond
| nostalgia of the old Internet.
|
| /s
| airstrike wrote:
| halloy now supports image embeds too, which is awesome given
| that has become "table-stakes" with how prevalent Discord is
|
| And it's time for my biweekly shoutout to iced, the wonderful
| GUI library used by halloy
|
| https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
|
| https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
| nicce wrote:
| Sometimes old things don't need a rewrite just for the sake
| of language-based advertising.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Sometimes old things don't need a rewrite just for the
| sake of language-based advertising.
|
| "X but in Rust" seems like the primary purpose for Rust to
| exist as far as I can tell.
| airstrike wrote:
| Well, remember you always have the choice to be informed
| instead.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date
| the highest form of discussing many topics online.
|
| Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things
| (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands)
| but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from
| having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of
| slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.
| diggan wrote:
| Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as
| you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I
| was active on, is still around with new threads being posted
| once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions.
| So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more
| communities used regular forums.
| danielbln wrote:
| That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not
| remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to
| surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a
| central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not
| suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time
| communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its
| time, but I think we found better solutions now.
| diggan wrote:
| > Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are
| impossible to surface any information from?
|
| As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part
| of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is
| ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most
| followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for
| the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit
| more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being
| equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for
| me.
|
| Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have
| vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate
| work like that.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| There was definitely competition for most post count and
| some forums had reputation.
| diggan wrote:
| I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly
| surface structured "reputation" although of course
| informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.
|
| Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum
| you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads
| that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.
|
| One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is
| actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to
| its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job
| with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the
| discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive
| set of rules also helps.
| Meekro wrote:
| I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with
| someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't
| just downvote and move on.
| epolanski wrote:
| You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote
| button I fear.
|
| The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of
| promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the
| discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what
| you agree on" button.
|
| Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on,
| you don't _have to_ answer.
|
| From HN's guidelines:
|
| > Users should vote and comment when they run across
| something they personally find interesting--not for
| promotion.
|
| From Reddit's Reddiquette:
|
| > If you think something contributes to conversation,
| upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the
| community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular
| community, downvote it.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote
| button that way it doesn't matter how you personally use
| it. The end result is anything that goes against the
| hivemind gets suppressed.
|
| I've had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things
| (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to
| oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people
| didn't see that their preconceived notions were probably
| wrong. It's no wonder politics has become more insular.
|
| HN is better than most, thankfully.
| diggan wrote:
| > HN is better than most, thankfully.
|
| Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too
| real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of
| redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is
| factual and adds to the topic.
|
| Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed
| that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something
| "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a
| flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around
| as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more,
| I guess.
| p_ing wrote:
| Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos.
| You'll be -1 in no time.
|
| I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15
| is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15
| configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.
|
| Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of
| users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!
|
| Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote ==
| disagree/opinion I don't like.
| silisili wrote:
| I think something threaded similar to Reddit but without
| voting would be a nice middle ground. My biggest gripe
| with vBulletin style is how replies to earlier comments
| work and are so out of order.
| wsatb wrote:
| Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with
| Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to
| surface information from.
|
| I think the major advantage of old forums is the community.
| You don't really get the sense of community on a large
| network, which causes a host of other problems.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I
| could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum
| topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were
| Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could
| search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all
| topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that
| really not me being outsider but just how it was?
| 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2
| ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/ 2: https://
| web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisak
| u/subback.html
| epolanski wrote:
| > That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not
| remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to
| surface any information from?
|
| There's rarely reasons for that.
|
| Example on MBWorld:
|
| https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/
|
| Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):
|
| https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13
|
| I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great
| fit for long running discussions.
|
| They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to
| consume than email threads.
|
| > it's not suitable for tickets (jira)
|
| You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you
| would open an issue on GH.
|
| With good organization and barely any moderation you can go
| far.
|
| I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of
| Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy,
| race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website
| development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like
| "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board
| or in a chat". Ever.
|
| Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication
| channels, plus another two/three different softwares for
| issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving
| half a dozen people lol.
| danielbln wrote:
| Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else.
| I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and
| it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.
| s_dev wrote:
| They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker
| news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior
| to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.
| diggan wrote:
| > there is a reason you're using hacker news
|
| It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-
| metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to
| write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat
| list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in
| whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can
| follow along. Looks like this:
| https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png
|
| Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme
| lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity
| sorting?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| > Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png
|
| This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to
| share?
| bluGill wrote:
| I use HN and reddit because they are a source of
| interesting third party articles on random topics that then
| can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original
| discussion on a given topic. Those are very different
| things that meet very different needs.
| epolanski wrote:
| > there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably
| reddit
|
| It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but
| discussions fade and die quickly.
|
| Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums.
|
| Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for
| discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade,
| overclockers.uk and some others.
|
| Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I
| listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just
| unfit.
| sph wrote:
| Voting systems indirectly operate as propaganda that tells
| you what to believe and how to conform with the hive mind.
| "Good thought" is conveniently found at the top with a
| large number of virtual points, "bad thought" is hidden for
| you at the bottom in harder-to-read colour.
|
| I surely am not the only one that often skips to comments
| without even reading the article, which is tantamount to
| saying "I don't have time to form my own opinion. Tell me
| what to believe about this topic"
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a
| tree for representing a conversation.
|
| Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The
| discussions happening there were usually of higher quality
| and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to
| that though, including some that have nothing to do with
| vBulletin itself.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long
| eventually several branches reach a point where someone
| being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being
| discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two
| back.
| epolanski wrote:
| Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I
| would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum
| with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where
| pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle
| of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.
| sph wrote:
| A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or
| tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep
| trees.
| numpad0 wrote:
| How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software
| across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in
| screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
| diggan wrote:
| > but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not
| so intuitive to use.
|
| Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most
| of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily
| customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except
| for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some
| don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I
| wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick
| with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams
| AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's
| harder to get comfortable with the software this way.
| diggan wrote:
| > Some discussions benefit from real time communication,
| some don't
|
| Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be
| "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving
| towards what you mention would be great.
|
| > I think that's where the real problem lies
|
| That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say
| I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At
| "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal
| use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for
| example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams
| internally", that'd be crazy.
|
| The number of times a development community I want to join
| is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public
| forum, is something I constantly encounter.
| bluGill wrote:
| Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the
| concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to
| follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that
| concept are great, search them out.
| diggan wrote:
| > but even today most don't have the concept of "I've
| already seen this".
|
| Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that
| normally works, is that you go to the last post you
| remember reading, then continue from there. So start at
| last page, go back until you remember what you're coming
| across, continue reading from there.
|
| Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though,
| the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active
| and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
| boxed wrote:
| A year ago seems like very new when talking about an IRC client
| to me.
| pabs3 wrote:
| HexChat has been explicitly abandoned, and the former
| maintainer didn't want it continued under other maintainers. No
| major forks yet, but Debian has a couple extra patches.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I started feeling bad about having used mIRC for 20ish years
| without paying for it so I switched to HexChat. It does
| everything I need and has a simpler interface, but I do
| sometimes miss the hacked up pirated copies of mIRC that were
| customized with scripts to do different things.
|
| >Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the
| news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago.
|
| Pretty sure it's had security updates more recent than that,
| but I don't really pay attention.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| _Don't forget to bring a large trout_
| futurecat wrote:
| Ooooh I forgot about that! thank you! :D
| patwolf wrote:
| I haven't used mIRC since the 5.X days, but I recall the author
| always included an updated profile photo in the about page. It
| was interesting to watch him age with each release update.
|
| I downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and
| sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| I've never used mIRC (I use WeeChat under tmux), but I use IRC
| every day; I have for almost two decades.
|
| I had no idea mIRC was still being actively developed!
| nobleach wrote:
| Just here to bask in the nostalgia. I hit up bash.org from time
| to time just to remember what was... and what will probably never
| be again.
| languagehacker wrote:
| mIRC was my favorite app back in the '90s. Without it, I wouldn't
| have been able to spend like two days downloading The Decline
| from NOFX over a 56k dial-up connection.
|
| Honestly I'd probably still be using it if DALnet hadn't been
| DDoS'ed for months on end.
| bn-l wrote:
| We had a school server. It was so exciting back then. Having
| long, live conversations with people by text was a new thing. It
| was the first time I had spoken to people in that form at my
| school and had seen their "text" personality (which is different
| to what you get IRL).
| joemazerino wrote:
| The mIRC connection sound will always have a place in my heart. I
| think Slack distinctly ripped it off.
| alecsm wrote:
| I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt
| like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the
| context menus, write auto responses, etc.
|
| I remember doing an "AI" bot that you could talk to. If it
| recognized any words you said it would get a random predefined
| string from a .txt and send it to you. And a lot of "hacking"
| scripts. Fun times.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| Me too! I still remember /perform, and even more fondly when I
| figured out how to create dialogs that would then trigger slash
| commands.
|
| NoNameScript was extremely inspiring in that regard. Not to
| mention the color theme of Brevduva Script.
|
| Good times!
| alecsm wrote:
| NoNameScript was the last standing mIRC script. It was sad to
| see it dying.
|
| We have WeeChat now but IRC doesn't feel the same. It was the
| Instagram of our time.
| mike503 wrote:
| Same. One of my first forays into scripting. TCL for eggdrops
| too. Spent a lot of time and energy on IRC :)
| sph wrote:
| Same. In the 2000s the mIRC scripting scene was buzzing, so
| many interesting scripts pushing the boundaries of the language
| to the point of binding directly into the Win32 API to do
| pretty much anything. We had music players, custom GUIs, bots,
| colour themes, all hand crafted by teenagers. I used to spend
| all my days chatting and browsing mircscripts.org
|
| It's weird how that scene has just disappeared and no one seems
| to have written about it in retrospective. I keep thinking I
| should be the one to write about an article about that long
| lost art, but it's so long ago and memory is a bit hazy.
|
| I was so annoyed when I moved to Linux and I had to chat with
| KVIRC which was so inflexible and rigid compared to mIRC.
| tymscar wrote:
| Please do write about that. It would be a shame to not have
| any material about it!
| ceautery wrote:
| This brings back memories. I developed the "JoTrivia" mIRC script
| back around 2000/2001 as a way to kill time when I worked
| nighttime tech support and got maybe two calls a night. The
| scripting language syntax was completely bonkers, e.g.,
|
| on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }
|
| Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a
| community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.
| keyle wrote:
| That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd be
| worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Not really. It was around the same time Napster blew up and
| became worth tons of money. Realistically, it was probably
| worth millions at its peak and is probably worth a million or
| so now.
|
| Edit: The company's filing says they have 1.2 million in
| assets. So realistically, to buy the company, you're looking at
| a few million. It's a 2 man show so I suspect they would want a
| few million or so to give up that revenue stream
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it'd
| be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.
|
| Honestly, I'm surprised the author hasn't monetized it better
| by stealing back the features that were stolen by discord. Make
| some mIRC hosted servers and an easier way to connect to them
| by making them the defaults when you launch the program and
| such. Build in support for graphics and voice chat, etc.
| ndegruchy wrote:
| If I still used Windows, I would still use mIRC. I bought a copy
| ages ago and it's still one of my favorite clients. Highly
| customizable and fast as hell.
| crazymoka wrote:
| Started my mp3 collection with mIRC client. I believe my first
| mp3 was Killing in the Name by RATM followed up by Sober by Tool.
| Showed my friend how to play music on the computer and they were
| blown away. The good old days. Finding help for SQL, programming
| was a lot faster than today for some subjects.
|
| Sometimes I pop into HexChat but the servers I used to use aren't
| there or not as good. Freenode? I think it was called.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Undernet on the #zeraw channel is where I spent a bit of time
| hanging out. You'd trade open FTP servers, I assume sysadmins
| had misconfigured them, that other users had uploaded games to.
|
| Games used to be split by disk files, i.e. 1.44mb individual
| files, and I would download 1 - 10 overnight while my friend
| would grab 11 - 20. We'd later call each other and use Zmodem
| to build a full set each.
|
| Fun time to be on the internet.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Undernet on the #zeraw
|
| I totally forgot about warez being backwards sometimes. I
| still visit #bookz but don't really pirate games and other
| media much anymore. Piracy really is a service issue and not
| a pricing problem once you're an adult with real money.
| Urgo wrote:
| For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for
| all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and
| they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a
| license only for a year.
|
| I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC
| in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be
| around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as
| lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have
| honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones
| follow the new rules.
|
| You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and
| post 2016
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160215000000*/https://www.mirc...
| Suppafly wrote:
| >In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous
| lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
|
| That almost alleviates my guilt over having used it forever
| without paying for it.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| I registered my copy. I also remember that in the Help->About, if
| you clicked Khaled Mardam-Bey's nose it would squeak.
| tomkarho wrote:
| Let's hope development continues until 2051.
| https://xkcd.com/1782.
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