mIRC 7.81

As someone who grew up on Windows + mIRC + vBulletin forums (late 90s, early 00s), mIRC will always ignite fond memories :)<p>For those who still use IRC, but maybe on other platforms than Windows, HexChat could be considered a spiritual successor to mIRC, but it&#x27;s also open source and available on a ton of platforms. Just a happy user here, not affiliated in any way.<p>Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news&#x2F;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?

For mIRC&#x27;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.<p>I know I shouldn&#x27;t be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s&#x2F;2000&#x27;s and they probably didn&#x27;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.<p>You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160215000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mirc.com&#x2F;register.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160215000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mirc...</a>

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.<p>I remember doing an &quot;AI&quot; 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 &quot;hacking&quot; scripts. Fun times.

Gosh, that brings back memories! I remember having so much fun coding my own trivia bots in mIRC Scripting Language (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIRC_scripting_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MIRC_scripting_language</a>) over 20 years ago.

IRC is what everyone used for group&#x2F;channel chats back when I grew up, out in rural Norway. Most towns had their #town channels, down to some very small hamlets that are barely populated today. Man, all the memories.<p>Always had some joker that had download some nefarious script (legit script-kiddies), that they&#x27;d share on the channels - and eventually get permabanned from.<p>Then MSN messenger became popular, and kind of drove away the more casual users. And after that social media became a thing, and the rest is history. Haven&#x27;t really used IRC in 20 years now. The people that continued to use IRC were mostly gamers, for team chats etc. But I guess discord killed that, too.

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.

I haven&#x27;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.<p>I downloaded this version to see if that was still the case, and sadly the about page no longer includes a photo.

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).

I learned programming using mIRC scripting. There used to be bunch of quiz chaneles about trivia. I logged channel to collect questions and then wrote script that provided response after some time based on linear function k + n*len(response). That was my fist piece of software I wrote. mirc scrpting based on event system was super nice system to work with. Later I also wrote chat bot and i collected have some funny conversations with strangers.

If I still used Windows, I would still use mIRC. I bought a copy ages ago and it&#x27;s still one of my favorite clients. Highly customizable and fast as hell.

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.<p>Sometimes I pop into HexChat but the servers I used to use aren&#x27;t there or not as good. Freenode? I think it was called.

I registered my copy. I also remember that in the Help-&gt;About, if you clicked Khaled Mardam-Bey&#x27;s nose it would squeak.

For anyone who remembers that drama about lifetime licences being suspended unless you email him and have a whinge - this pissed me off immensely but a few months ago I tried my old licence that had stopped working and it worked again so I guess awful policy reversed.

mIRC was my favorite app back in the &#x27;90s. Without it, I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to spend like two days downloading The Decline from NOFX over a 56k dial-up connection.<p>Honestly I&#x27;d probably still be using it if DALnet hadn&#x27;t been DDoS&#x27;ed for months on end.

This brings back memories. I developed the &quot;JoTrivia&quot; mIRC script back around 2000&#x2F;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.,<p>on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }<p>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.

I&#x27;ve never used mIRC (I use WeeChat under tmux), but I use IRC every day; I have for almost two decades.<p>I had no idea mIRC was still being actively developed!

That beautiful application was on the wrong decade. Today it&#x27;d be worth millions if not more, for absolutely no reason at all.

The mIRC connection sound will always have a place in my heart. I think Slack distinctly ripped it off.

I spent my high school years on 14.4, 28.8, and finally 56k modems. When I got to college, I got my first taste of broadband, and boy did it get me in trouble. I would be up all night trading files on mIRC.

Latest News<p>mIRC 7.81 has been released! (April 9th 2025)<p>Whoa!

Why does mIRC distributes ca certs file and what is the usecase here? Just curious.

Let&#x27;s hope development continues until 2051. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1782" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1782</a>.

<i>Don’t forget to bring a large trout</i>

Is it still proprietary and Windows-only?

HexChat dies, mIRC lives?!

I&#x27;m so sorry, forgive me but has there been a release? What exactly is the news here?