The difference between the auto-update fuction and the what your suggesting is the timing.
Restarting for update is done before its connected to primaries and you have a room full of people. You cant restart for the port change settings to take effect without dropping them all, and all your WPN connections anyway. Button..maybe .. commands to restart would just be silly..
I see your point about the potential of dropping a room full of people. But that was not the scenario i was in when I had this brainfart. Someone asked if i could temp host their room while they rebooted and installed new software. I had a standby room running for my own, so agreed to help. The few peeps that were in my standby room were also parked in my main room.
I edited the config to change the channelname to the other room's, changed the port, then click the [reload] button. As I first reported, the config reloaded, the roomname changed, but the port did not change and the few in the room did not get dumped [as they would have, as you point out, if the port had changed] I didn't think abou tthat possibility, but it wouldn't have mattered too much since the regs parked in my standby room were also in my main room.
The reason I wanted a port change for the other channelname was to reduce future confusion. Keeping the same port for both would allow future joins under either channelname, and some might not know which temp room they were in or might not even know it was a temp. By changing the port, after I changed back to my standby channelname/port, those who may have added the temp room hash to their favorites would not be able to connect. They would then search out the has for their normal main room.
I dropped an alternate channelname# months ago, but am noticing on my console that some people are still joining using the old name, even though it hasn't been in the config for a long time. Only changing the port would stop that.
Not such a biggie though to do a manual restart, as that seems to be the only way to change ports. I just thought of having a restart command/button because I recall some of the IRC bots I used had these types of commands - and if I recall correctly, one of them was tricky enough to do a 'restart' without dropping current DCC connections.