* There is a new system for settings in widgets. You may pass the param settings= and it’ll load the settings from a Mibbit account. To find out this ID, simply go into [prefs] and it’ll be shown at the top. Please note there is currently a bug that means it will not be shown right after a register. So if you register a new account, click reload, *then* go into prefs.

If you change any prefs in the Mibbit account obviously these will be used the next time your widget gets loaded.

* Banning… If Mibbit has the information, you’ll get 2 new user menu options – ban the user, and ban the host. It will have this info if the user arrived after you, or if you have done a WhoIS on the user on that server. Later on the info will also be shared so that you should get info for all users.

* New infrastructure for a [My account] tab. This will contain private things, like email, account settings, etc

* On channel search results, if we have the info, get to see which channels are actually busy. If there are Mibbitians on the channel, we will also include info such as (6 users, 2 chatting). A user is defined as chatting if they said something in the last 10 minutes. Note also they can be any client, not just mibbit users.

* Known tor exit nodes are now blocked from Mibbit due to abuse.

Mibbit continues to grow well, 4 million lines of chat handled daily now.

Here are some new features:

* Channel search works a little better. Now the server name is searched as well. So you can search for “freenode”, and all the channels on freenode will be returned.
* Channel search now has pagination. When you do a search, you can now page next and back etc.
* Text links and channel links color can now be set with prefs.
* Fixed a bug related to people trying to login before the page had properly loaded.
* First (beta) version of PM logging is live.

Some notes about the logging – This is disabled by default for now. If you’d like to enable it, just go into your prefs, and click on “Log my PMs”. It will take effect the *next* server you connect to. Please rest assured that your logs are completely safe and confidential. If you wish to remove one of them you can click on ‘delete’ from [Logs].

We also have WEBIRC setup with rizon and a few other new servers on board which is great

We also now have a ‘language’ setting in prefs, which can also be passed in via the widget. The available options so far are ‘en’ (English), and ‘fr’ (French). We will be adding to this during the week This setting effects most of the messages, menus, etc.

Each day on mibbit:
* 10Gb of data transferred.
* 2.5 Million lines of chat received.
* 260,000 lines of chat sent.
* 16,500 IRC Connections handled.
* 2,000 image URLs auto-thumbnailed.
* 100 pastebins created (New feature).

Just pushed out some new features that should make some peoples life easier.

Please once again, accept my apologies when the backend restarts. I try to do this at quiet times, and only once or twice a week. On the minus side, you have to reconnect. On the plus side, you get new features

* If the IRC server is setup for WEBIRC, the ident is no longer set to the users IP in hex. This means if you are connecting to a WEBIRC enabled server, and have a cloak setup there, people can’t see your IP.

* You can now choose to see extra information on joins/parts. This includes the hostmark, (mibbit/widget), and the device (ipod/iphone/wii). Just set the options in Prefs, or pass these into the widget URL. This is disabled as default (I *think* most people won’t be interested).

* You can connect to SSL IRC servers Please note you need to find a server that supports SSL, and make sure you are connecting on the correct port for SSL. The way to signify Mibbit should use SSL, is to simply prefix the port with a ‘+’. For example irc.irchighway.net:+9999

* Mibbit now replies to ctcp pings. A small one, but good to know :/

* /whowas replies are parsed and show up nicely on the currently active tab for that server.

Enjoy

Just a quick update… Now if a smiley appears where it shouldn’t be, just click it to turn it back into text. If you did that by mistake, click it again to turn it back into a smiley.

For example if you have ” (:this:) “
The would be shown as a smiley. But you don’t know if it was or etc. But now you can just click it.

Little feature, but hopefuly useful
Back to work on the logging system for me.

Firstly apologies for the small downtime of irc.mibbit.com today, that server has been upgraded so it shouldn’t happen again now.

First cool feature is nick following on PMs. Previously, if someone PMed you, then changed their nick, you had to abort that tab and start a new PM with them. Now their nick change is recognised properly and you can keep chatting away to them. This makes things a lot easier, especially for people who like to change their nicknames a lot.

Also, you can now double click on a user in the userlist to PM them. You can adjust the double click speed, or disable this feature in the [prefs].

Another addition is /ignore and /unignore . These are done on a per channel basis.

Another cool feature, you can now paste things a bit easier. No need to go off to one of those pastebin sites…

Simply click on [PasteBin], paste some text into the big text area that appears, then click [paste].
It’s create a new URL for your paste, and insert the url into your text input bar ready to send

Later on there’ll be syntax highlighting, line numbering, etc etc, but this is a good start.

Image thumbnailing should work a bit better now, they now get cached and images are recognised a bit better

Tab completion and input history should work in IE/FF/Safari/Opera now, fixing a couple of previous issues, and making things work better.

Also if you access the input history, your cursor should now be positioned at the end of the line.

Sorry about the brief outage on friday of irc.mibbit.com, the machine ran out of memory due to a couple of misconfigurations. Shouldn’t happen again.

This new feature is one I’ve thought long about. On the plus side, it’s useful, and adds a bit more glitz to the chat. On the minus side, people could abuse it and be pains in the neck.

I have decided to enable it as default though, and see how it goes. If you would like to disable it, it’s available in prefs, and also widget users can pass in the appropriate setting in the url.

What this feature does, is look for any image URLs in the chat. (jpg/jpeg/png/gif). When it finds one, it generates a nice little thumbnail and puts it in the chat, makes it clickable to the original.

The default thumbnail size is small – 30×30, but can be changed in settings.

Please do be aware, just as if you spam links to websites, if you start spamming picture URLs, you will probably get kicked. If they are abusive/NSFW pictures, you might get banned or even have your access to Mibbit blocked all together.
Also be aware that URLs take a lot of characters. You are still subject to the normal limits of IRC line lengths etc.

Later on we may have some sort of ‘safe’ filter for images.

With power becomes responsibility Having said that it’s kinda cool

There is a new input options menu underneath the text input bar. You can select smilies, colors, and set translation options here.

This is shown as default, but if you would like to hide it (eg for a widget where you don’t have much space, you can pass it as an option in the url showInputOptions=false)

Sorry about the server issues last week, these have been sorted out. They were caused by a combination of bad memory settings, and massive object churn.

Couple of new networks on board, most notably undernet and another efnet server
Also added a couple new smilies, I’ll sort out the rest very soon.

The input options at the bottom will be pretty useful. Expect to see things like [PasteBin] [Send file] and things like that one day!

The next thing that is due to be released soon is logging, which is going well.