Yes! Tweeting has been known to come from middle-Mibbit. Here’s how;
* Connect to chat as usual – http://mibbit.com/chat
* Click the Twitter logo and enter your Twitter account details, don’t worry, we won’t cache your details
* Press Go!
* You’re in, see your Twitter stream in the tab, type a message in the chat line to send a tweet
One chat to tweet them all 
The Mibbit client has been serviced by multiple back-end servers for a while now but just recently we’ve added a second server to our IRC network. Thanks to Kitsune and Axod for the hard work getting this up and running, if you’re a serious user of the network read on and see what services have been upgraded to the latest version.
These include;
Check out irc.us.mibbit.net or irc.uk.mibbit.net specifically or leave as irc.mibbit.net to be load balanced on either box.
This is great stuff and thanks to Axod, Kitsune and all the Ops on Mibbit for their hard work making sure this is running well. 
Check the graph at Netsplit for the last 2 weeks traffic.
Today Mibbit reached over 11,600 concurrent client connections up from 10,000 earlier in the week. Today the world also witnessed Apple announce a new device and this event, together with the growth we’re experiencing pushed us over 11,000 for the first time. Pretty cool stuff for a Web IRC client. 
In particular, CNet TV saw a huge spike in chat connections to Watchbol.com as it covered the iPad launch, up to well over 1000 people chatting at once. Congrats for a great show guys!
Mibbit is supporting the Oxfam campaign fund to get water, road clearing, hospital resources, food and shelter to Haiti quickly. What’s happened there feels terrible, total devastation, much more than homelessness and starvation, they already had plenty of that.
They need basic infrastructure, food and water urgently, so it’s time for us to pause from talking tech and time to help.
Thanks for listening, Click here to read more about what Oxfam is doing for Haitians.
Did you know you can get your nickserv password reset quickly? Or maybe you want to lock-down your nickname so nobody else uses it. It’s part of the way IRC works that nicknames are available to anyone who uses the /nick command, but if you follow this tip, you can register and protect a nickname on Mibbit for use only by you and keep using it no matter what.
Here’s how: join a Mibbit channel like this one and change your nickname to the one you want by using the “/nick” command in the chat line entry box. Next, register the nickname with nickserv and enter the confirmation code: to do this type “/msg nickserv register <password> <email>” where <password> is one you choose and <email> is an address you own. Providing the nick isn’t already registered nickserv will send you an e-mail confirmation code, take this code and go back to Mibbit to type: “/msg nickserv confirm <confirmation code>”.
Your nick is now registered to you! Here’s the full Wiki on this! Now each time you come back to Mibbit you can use /nick <name> to change to your preferred nick and /msg identify <password> (using the password you chose) and your nick will be passed back to you. Don’t fancy the long commands? Setup a Mibbit account and tell Mibbit to remember your nick (see figure below). You can even log in to Twitter to read & tweet whilst chatting.
For the Jedi out there the nickserv command can hide your e-mail (”/msg nickserv set hide email on”) and can also force impersonators to get off your nick quickly (”/ns set kill quick”). Check the Wiki article here for more info.
Nicks work in a similar way on other IRC networks, Mibbit does not admin other networks – you need to contact them to do this. Finally, to reset a nickserv password follow this!
Happy chatting Mibbitians!
If you’re thinking about setting up a chat widget for your site it’s very easy to do quickly (see here ). Besides the techie bit you’ll need to choose an IRC network for your chat to connect to, if that’s something you’ve considered before or maybe you’re just thinking about options for the future this blog entry lists a few handy links and resources.
We’re often being asked which network to use and there’s no need for this to be a tricky issue, it is important for you to get the right network because many are tailored to specific communities and their rules and operators reflect this, they may even have additional tools or bots which can help you with a specific requirement. There are some great networks out there and several resources available to search for networks to try – use either Searchirc.com, Netsplit.de and Gogloom.com or use Mibbits own listing at mibbit.com/networks.
Mibbit has it’s own network and this is default if no parameters are used. To use a specific network, one of the main networks, or a new and upcoming net we do provide connectivity to many of the thousands out there already to give you the flexibility you need. If you’re an experienced IRC admin and you’re setting up your own server we can connect to that too, just tell us the details and we will setup a connection from our side. If your channel is already on another network just find the server details and test the connection, it’s likely that Mibbit already has connection, if not you can put in a request.
Mibbit will never be an anonymizer and always provides ways to identify a chatters IP address to a network. The best way to strengthen security is by using WebIRC to pass connection details securely between Mibbit and the IRC network, this is beneficial for both you and the network in managing bans and so on. To learn more about how to do this check the Wiki.
Lastly, if you’re already setup but need to change IRC server it’s as simple as editing the URI parameters! If your channel moves servers or is mirrored on another network or irc server with better performance just change the entry using the widget manager! Simple as that.
We have several new networks joining Mibbit each week, so keep a look out for new ones are listed here!
Happy New Year to everyone! Usage was a little erratic over the holidays but returned to the 9000 peak and higher, looking to see if it nudges 10,000 for the first time soon.
Over the break Mibbit has seen a small clutch of plugins released making our chat widget available on several different platforms. First up is the popular vBulletin forum platform where developer, and IRC network, vbIRC have been busy writing a plugin which lets forum users enter the widget using their real forum name as a nick. Joshua Lückers has developed a great Google Chrome extension for users who want to make Mibbit their default irc:// handler and finally, two Wordpress plugins are available making it easy to add Mibbit to a Wordpress blog. The first, by Keiran Smith is straight forward to install, and the second, by Joshua Lückers, is getting lots of daily downloads from the Wordpress plugin directory.
Many thanks to all these guys for their enthusiasm and efforts on this, great work!
To see a full list of modules and plugins for Mibbit check the wiki; http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Modules
We’ve been doing some backend work in two areas recently.
1. Scaling. We’ve grown by something like 300% in the last 12 months, and we need to provision for even faster growth in 2010. We’ve expanded from having a single backend for Widgets, to having 4 backend servers. This allows us to grow, and also gives us failover, and an easy way to update backends without having to kick everyone off. If you run a network, you do not need to modify anything. All widget backends use the same IP address for outgoing IRC connections.
2. Network communications. We want to ensure that the Mibbit client is the fastest it can be, and provides the best experience for users. We also want to ensure it’s optimized in terms of bandwidth usage. This means looking for new technologies, and new improvements we can make.
We’ve just updated the backends, and here’s the main changes you’ll find:
- You may have noticed on the latest main client, it shows the current lag between your browser and the mibbit server. It does this by sending a ping every 5 minutes and measuring the time to get a pong. You can also click it to request a lag check. Note that this is only between you and the Mibbit server, not to any IRC networks. We plan to implement some lag features for IRC later on. The lag is also logged on the Mibbit server in order for us to improve the user experience. For example if we find that lag from browsers in the UK is high, we may setup a UK backend.Once again, thanks for your understanding when we do have to restart a backend, we’re nearing a time now where we can do complete rolling updates and not have to kick anyone off.
It’s a real privilege to work on something that is used by so many people, and we really do appreciate your use of Mibbit. If you have any thoughts, ideas or gripes, please do feel free to catch me on irc.mibbit.net.
Happy holidays Mibbitians!
We’re doing quite a lot of upgrades to the backend servers that keep Mibbit running. This will mean far better scalability/failover/etc going forward.
It also means that we’re now able to update backends without having to kick everyone off for most updates. There’s still the odd situation which calls for a restart, but these are getting rarer. We’ll try to warn of any scheduled downtime.
We’re still growing at a great rate – the last week was the busiest week ever on Mibbit (A regular occurrence), so we need to make sure we can support all the users adequately.
One of the other cool things we’re rolling out is some compression enhancements which should make Mibbit that little bit faster, and reduce bandwidth usage.
We’re just starting to map out a major revamp to the main client, so stay tuned for details of that in the new year
Thanks once again for all your feedback, feature ideas, and for helping Mibbit along. It really is great to be part of such a friendly community.
If you happen to be sufficiently talented to speak Hungarian and Afrikaans you can now take your pick of user interface language thanks to new translations available. To change your UI goto Preferences and select your language from the drop-down.
Most of the UI text and menus will switch to your new language pref making it easier and hopefully quicker for you! Alternatively if, like me, your language skills stretch no further than schoolboy French then simply speak Mibbit and let the frog translate for you. Click here to see how. Több mint negyven nyelven, Lekker!