Monthly Archives: April 2009

Latest updates

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Growth
Growth has been fast and steady for Mibbit. Back in December, we were handling 250 IRC lines a second, turns out that was nothing and we now do over 700! that’s 1.8bn per month.  This creates very interesting challenges in terms of scaling and memory management :)

Some details on the couple of recent restarts, mainly to the widget backend. There has been a very slow burning memory leak, which has meant that it runs out after a few days. Sorry if you happened to be around when we restarted.  Memory leak fix expected in the new release.

New features

  • Widget channel key prompt – you can now tell your widget to ask the user for a channel key.  This is very useful to keep your channel private.  Just make sure your users know the key :)
  • Highlight chat from one user – hover over a nickname and all of their lines of chat will be highlighted.  This is especially useful for busy channels where there may be several conversations going on at once.
  • Smiley packs – yay! you can now load up preset smiley packs.  Just go to prefs->smileys, pick one, and click on load.  More coming soon.
  • Main UI translated to Polish.  Many thanks to Kamil for translating! go to prefs to change UI language.  Wódki all round!
Abuse
As you know, Mibbit was never intended to be a tool to be misused or abused. It is not our intention to allow anyone to evade bans or abuse networks using Mibbit, and we do all we can to prevent this.
With this release, we now check the excellent dronebl.org blacklist.  If the user is listed, they will be told, and directed to the dronebl website where they will find removal instructions.
 
This should make it more difficult for people to connect to Mibbit through proxies, botnets, etc. Which should mean less abuse to networks, and improved execution of bans.

Who is actually chatting?????

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If you’ve used IRC for a while, you’ll know that people tend to idle. And when I say idle, I mean for days… weeks… months. They may just set their client to join a channel, and log it, and never actually chat.

So one of the useful questions to ask when you join a channel, is “who is actually alive and talking in here”.

Well, now Mibbit can answer that question for you. When you join a channel, it’ll send details of who is recently active in that channel, when they last said something (Hover over a user to see that).

A user is defined as ‘chatting’ if they said something in the last N seconds, where N is 10 minutes default.

Note that this info is per channel. You’re only chatting in that userlist if you’re chatting on *that* channel.

There’s a few new settings in the [UserList] section of [prefs] to control how things are shown. The default is to sort by ‘chatting’, and to bold any chatting users. This means you can easily see who is actually active in a channel, and because they’re near the top, you have easy access to their usermenu, can see them typing, etc.

  • Sort order – This defines how the user list is sorted. The default sorts by ‘chatting’ first. At the end, it’s sorted alphabetically. Available sorts are chatting,owner,admin,op,halfop,voice,active. separate them with commas.
  • Bold recent chatters – To make recent chatters stand out, you can have them bolded (default).
  • Recent chatter time – The time to keep someone in the ‘chatting’ status after they last spoke.
If you want Mibbit to look the way it did before this update, just uncheck the bold-recent-chatters, and remove the ‘chatting’ from the sort-order.
/part [reason] works now, as it should. Also /part <channel(s)> [reason] works.
/removechat is now case insensitive, and also removes the chat from the recentchat buffer so that new users joining will not see it.
There’s some vastly improved buffering which means things should load a lot faster – images, pastebins, uploads, etc.
The tab backgrounds are now served from https:// if you’re using https://www.mibbit.com This is a step towards getting rid of the “mixed” warning message.