Mibbit blog

24 months ago our humble client was born. See the Way Back Machine for how we used to be.

Almost inline with the growth of its main client Mibbit has climbed up to #36 in the Top-100 global IRC networks ranked by netsplit.de.   Alternative channel listing site SearchIRC has us at 1100+ channels.

There are thousands of networks worldwide with the statisticians monitoring between 500000 and 750000 IRC users online at any one time.  To register a channel on Mibbit check here for details.

A big thank you to our Operators at Mibbit! You know who you are!

Mibbit Widget officially exits beta

It’s been a long while coming and now it’s finally time to exit the beta stage and announce premium account plans for the widget.  At Mibbit we are extremely proud to have brought our service to where it is today and now these additions provide even more options for our customers to choose from.  Before getting to details here is a little about what this means;

• we are no longer operating the widget on a perpetual beta only; Mibbit is here for the long-haul
• the main client and free widget will continue to be available as before
• if you are a widget account user who wants ad-free and extra features there’s now a option to do this
• our plans start from the equivalent of just over $4 a month, less than a large Frappuccino

During the beta we took on a lot of feedback from customers and learned a few lessons about scalability, if you’re one of the people who contributed thank you for all your feedback!  There were several things we took from the beta chats and e-mails;

• Pricing – users told us they are happy to contribute in return for not having ads,
• People want to pay only for the features they’re using
• Branding – the ability to style, customise and brand your widget is important
• Persistent channel logs – having channel logs is a nice to have but not a huge requirement

In addition the new premium widget provides;

• higher/unlimited upload file-size
• support for IRC channel password protection
• additional styling and preferences incl. custom background, custom icons and smiley’s
• advertisement-free format

Our goal is to provide the smartest, best performing chat service available.  We’re regularly receiving requests for new features and feel that although many of these will make their way into the free service the best way to provide for some items of functionality is to deliver them for premium accounts first.  We have two main packages available, Premium and Premium plus – with user breaks.  Widget accounts are tied to a single domain and the key metric is how many Mibbit widget users are connected at peak times. The limits are not hard limits, but are monitored and flagged up if the allowance is constantly exceeded or always way below.  If this happens we’ll let you know and propose a more appropriate package.  Generally, if it’s over peak for an hour or two, we’ll let it slide.

Now it’s over to you to choose what you want, stick with basic or upgrade,  go over to our widget manager and take a look at the plans available, you don’t have to sign a long-term contract, and you’re free to cancel at any time.  Users wanting multi-domain and 500+ user packages get in touch for one of us to advise you on the best package.

We really thank you for all your business and support,
Mibbit.

There’s a new menu for channels in the main client. This is how it looks:

As you can see, it shows up where the user list usually is, and contains a few useful menu items so far. An easy to use button to set the channel topic is present if you’re OP or above in that channel.

The other very useful addition is the SHARE button at the bottom. You can use this to bookmark the channel, or to tell people where you’re chatting. For example, you could tweet or facebook saying that you’re chatting in this channel, then others can come and join you.

The new channel options menu will be expanded on in the future, to make things even easier for users, and to provide useful options.

There’s some new features in development that should make Mibbit even better and easier to use. We’re just working on the finishing touches.

A couple of features that snuck in while you may not have been looking – errors/alerts now popup in a lightbox modal type dialog, and you can setup your chat to look a bit more rounded (Not in internet explorer)

We’ve also been spending more time to ensure that Mibbit stays up – even if the hosting co decides to reboot all the servers

Also hit a nice record today, of 8,500 connections on Mibbit at the peak today. Possible we could hit 10,000 by end of year. Thanks again to everyone who has helped realize the vision of Mibbit so far, there’s a lot left to come

Unfortunately our webhost had some issues tonight and had to power cycle each server.

It looks like everything is working fine now, but apologies for any downtime.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4765

http://twitter.com/linode

If you’ve never heard of LaTeX before, you’re not alone. LaTeX is a markup language for typesetting, and is often used to write formulae so that they show up properly.

Here’s the wikipedia article, with cool tutorials and references listed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

LaTeX parsing is enabled by default, but it’s in prefs if you’d rather turn it off. Any LaTeX is enclosed in “{$ ” and ” $}” to signify it’s LaTeX.

For example, you could write “blauegh! Formula should be {$ f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2}dt $} and NOT {$ f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2000}dt $} silly!“

And here’s an example of how it shows up in Mibbit.

For some, this will be completely irrelevant, but it seems a useful thing to have in a visual webchat client

All backends have been updated with new code, here’s the main feature updates:

• Mibbit clients now respond to CTCP TIME requests, with the users local time and timezone.
• The users local time and country are now shown in /whois replies. The country is via a simple lookup on the users IP.
• If you have icons showing in the user list (Green/blue guys), you can click on one. They’ll all change to showing flags. Click again, and they’ll all change to showing time of day icons (mouseover for exact local time + zone). Click again and they’ll go back to icons.

– Morning (8:00 am – 12:00 noon)

– Day (12:00 noon – 18:00 pm)

– Evening (18:00 pm – 22:00 pm)

– Night (22:00 pm – 8:00 am)

This means you can easily see with a couple of clicks where people are, and what sort of timezone they’re in

-> ->

* You can now change the colors of the text, and links that show up in input menus such as [Translation] [Pastebin] etc. Checkout [Prefs]->[Chat input].

* You can now change the icons that show to the left of users in the User List. If you don’t like the usual blue/green people, change it to something more fitting with the rest of your theme. For example, here’s some big monkeys.

Here’s the relevant settings, which can be found in [Prefs]->[User List].