If you already have a webirc config but it’s not been updated in a while it’s good practice to check the configuration has all four IPs in the CGI:IRC block. Without all four the connection may not be reliable.  What you need to edit depends on the IRCd you have, for the most common ones like Inspired and Unreal – we have info which may help you here.

Once you’ve completed setup and we make the corresponding entry our end you’ll get all the benefits of receiving complete connection data for users to help avoid cloaking and manage things appropriately.

This is not the case for all IRC networks, most are working, but some with older configs are unavailable.
We will give updates as normal service becomes available, in the meantime networks can avoid this issue by updating any old webirc configs with all routes – here’s the guide to how.

We noticed a couple of posts about changes to Mobile Safari browser which limits the number of connections it makes to a server to just one.  This binary, on/off, approach will restrict how web applications including ours work making things like disconnects, timeouts and missing artifacts a common problem. Allowing only one connection prevents other requests from being sent to the server until the open one has finished. This basically breaks any website using comet as these guys at Real Software point out in their note, Mobile Safari users are going to get a reduced experience.

Bug reports have been filed with Apple, the TechCrunch site reports the issue has been seen with sites including Google+ and gmail mobile.

So this is a note to say Apple, if you didn’t hear already, please take a look at this.

** Update 25 Oct **  We’ve contacted Apple support and put up a post on the community pages.

This additional benefit means Premium widget accounts will have the chance to promote their site, game, radio station or forum through the Mibbit pages and encourage people to join their service.* Each month, further ad slots over and above the free allowance will also be available to buy at a discounted rate for Premium customers.

More details will be given in an update to widget managers over the next few days. To become a Premium subscriber you need to have an active chat widget and upgrade your account.

Alternatively ad slots are available to buy at standard rates through our inventory linked here: http://mibbit.com/advertise.html

*Ads must be 728×90 size, artwork responsibility of the Widget account holder, all ads subject to Terms and final approval by Mibbit before publishing.

* Logs are working (12 Aug)

Chat and Widgets are responding and IRC nicknames can still be identified to and registered.

For chat – if you’re unable to connect please use https://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mibbit.net&channel=%23chat click ‘Go’ and join your channel(s) from there.

We’re working on the issue and will bring updates to you as we have them via this blog and @mibbitstatus.

Update: services working, login and search.mibbit operational, main client logs currently down for maintenance.

BitlBee is an IRC to Instant Messaging gateway server which can connect you with your IM accounts on Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other services like Twitter.  For people who communicate much of the time in IRC but miss having IM available from the same window this can be useful.

Connecting to bitlBee is easy because it looks like any other IRCd server.  You can try it here.  It’s a free service with several publicly available servers, at Mibbit we’ve installed one here for you to use.

Here’s how it looks in Mibbit – a new server tab and channel (&bitlbee):

BitlBee connection

If you’re interested in giving it a go here’s a handy guide:  http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Bitlbee

And don’t forget to see the folks at http://bitlbee.org where you can also setup a bitlBee server of your own.

If you used to use Meebo messenger or other clients you might find bitlBee a handy alternative.  Some people have used bitlBee with Mibbit in the past very well but we’ve not had our own server before.  We will keep it running and depending on how it gets used will think about whether to make it a more permanent feature for Mibbit.

• it defaults to using https://
• password recovery is updated to use a secure recovery token
• sticky config’d channel – your chosen channel now remains so you don’t have to re-enter it

Mibbit Widget

As always you can choose from a standard free chat widget or opt for an upgraded premium widget from $9.99* with all adverts removed.

Setup your widget here.

Creating aliases.

Aliases are created by storing a pair of strings in Preferences, a “match” and a corresponding “command”.
For example entering the match /think with the command /me thinks $1 would result in the entry to chat of “/think okay” being replaced with “sally thinks okay“.

Editing aliases is a case of loading your account Preferences and editing entries under the ’Alias’ tab:

In this example the alias  has been extended so that all of the words after /think are used in the replacement (using $1- in the Command).

In chat it would look like this:

Default aliases.

A whole set of useful aliases are stored in your account by default making it easier to use the client.  These are found at: http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Alias along with more information about how to use them.

Aliases can be hugely powerful when used with conventional IRC commands to carry out messaging and operator actions.  In the Main Client these commands can also be executed when a match occurs on joining a channel.  For example, the pair: >mibbit>#french and /translatethem english would mean every time Sally joins the #french channel her translation setting is changed to receive in English.

More information can be found in: http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Alias and http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/Alias/Examples

We’ve been working on a significant project to deliver improvements to load times and resilience, parts of the work have relied on other services which haven’t performed as expected and this has led to several periods where users might have had to reconnect to the Widget.

We’ve now reached point where new fixes and better code for fail over is in place and these improvements will serve to improve the Widget experience, these can be summarised as;

• settings (prefs) load direct from our Amazon S3 making the widget faster/better/smoother to load and use
• a new system updates and shares widget settings every minute down from every 15 (no more waiting for cache to complete)
• session resume and autoConnect now work better across browsers
• bugfix for non-set time zone / country on join is in place
• fixed an issue where invalid characters in URL cause loading to freeze or take a long time, this was occurring if an incorrect &settingsID= was used. ( a 5 second timeout is now in place )

Thank you to everyone who has helped highlight issues and show where improvements could be made, appreciate the input.

Widget load-balancing will be changing again so that a single domain identifier is shown to non-iframe users. As this happens we will give more info about the change.

Delivering improvement for the Widget is intended to make a better experience for everyone who uses Mibbit and IRC, going forward we intend to bring similar benefits to the Main Chat client and the way it loads, load-balances and performs.

Thanks for listening!

Mibbit