MIRC Scripting
mIRC's abilities and behaviors can be altered and extended using the embedded mIRC scripting language. mIRC includes its own GUI scripting editor, with help that has been described as "extremely detailed".
mIRC scripting is not limited to IRC related events and commands. There is also support for COM objects, calling DLLs, sockets and dialog boxes, among other things. This allows the client to be used in a variety of ways beyond chatting, for example as an IRC bot, a media player, a web HTML parser or for other entertainment purposes such as mIRC games. In practice however, mIRC will not be used solely for such specific purposes, but rather scripts for such purposes are addons for the client, which will otherwise be used for chatting.
Due to the level of access the language has to a user's computer, for example, being able to rename and delete files, a number of abusive scripts have been made. One example of abuse was that executed with the $decode identifier which decodes a given encoded string. The issue was reported in August 2001, and five months later, users were reported as still falling prey, tricked into executing commands on their systems which result in "handing control of mIRC over to somebody else". This led to changes being made in mIRC version 6.17: according to the author, $decode is now disabled by default, and various other features which can be considered dangerous are now lockable.
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