Thanks to another great user-initiated translation the number of languages handled by the Mibbit user-interface just went up from 11 to 12 with the addition of Russian.  There’s also English vs English (US) but we’re not being picky!

UI translations change the text used for items on screen like the send button, names of ‘Smileys’, ‘PasteBin’ and other items.  So for the Russian UI version the send button becomes “Отправить”.

The full list of languages is here along with instructions on how to change the setting.

And don’t forget, Mibbit supports a massive number of character sets and provides Google-Translate right in the chat pane too.

There’s a new feature in logging which makes it slightly easier to browse your PM logs.

If you haven’t set up logging, you can ask Mibbit to save PM logs for you. To do this, login at http://chat.mibbit.com click on prefs, and check [Save PMs to logs].

You can now browse by date, as well as by network. This is obviously very useful if you want to find conversations you had on a particular date.

Just click on [logs] from the main client, and then click on [By Date].

-axod

We have a new feature in place on the Mibbit Widget. It’s called session-resume, and means that when the widget is closed, and then opened again within 30 seconds, it will recognize, and reconnect you to your previous session.

This should be particularly useful on websites where you have many pages, but want a chat to be persistent across all pages.

The session-resume feature is now enabled as default. If you wish to disable it, you can add sessiontimeout=0 to your widget URL. If you’d like to change the timeout from 30 seconds, you can add sessiontimeout=10 to set it to 10 seconds. The maximum is 30 seconds.

When a session is resumed, you will be joined to any channels you had open at the time you closed the widget/reloaded it.

If you want to force the widget to start a new session, simply wait 30 seconds after you close the widget, before opening it again.

We’ve also added a close button to the first channel tab on the widget, which you can use to disconnect from the server. It will ask for confirmation. (If you have noServerTab=false then you will already have a closer on the server tab).

Another thing we’ve been working on is server infrastructure. We’re increasing capacity to cope with growth, and we’ve patched a kernel level bug which caused a couple of server crashes last week. (Sorry if you were kicked out of chat).

We’re gearing up development and hope to have some big announcements in the next few weeks

Thanks for using Mibbit!

Mibbit has noticed a small number of users experiencing problems when using AVG-Free edition.  If you use AVG-Free try loading Mibbit with https://chat.mibbit.com – this tells your browser to request encryption when loading Mibbit which gets around the issue with AVG.

The difficulty currently occurs only if using version (10.0.x) of AVG-Free with its Surf-Shield feature enabled.  If you use FireFox 3.5 or above or IE8 or later both include malware and phishing functionality comparable to ‘Surf shield’ (IE8 smart screen filtering and FireFox phishing and malware protection).

Testing the issue has so far confirmed that machines using AVG-Free v10.0.1120 with Linkscanner Surf-Shield switched off do not experience the issue.  We’ll bring you more on this as we look at it further.

*Update: 11.10.2010 AVG have posted a forum note saying they are aware of a bug and are currently working on a fix.  They’ve also listed their recommended workaround. See: http://forums.avg.com/gb-en/avg-free-forum?sec=thread&act=show&id=113513

*Update: 19.10.2010 AVG have released a work-around which fixes Linkscanner Surf-shield.  Update your AVG!

Just a quick reminder that you can now use /list to list channels on IRC servers you’re connected to.

If you do use /list on its own you’ll get a slightly unwieldy and large list of channels. However, you can use some arguments to better find what you’re looking for.

You can add keywords to the end of /list. For example “/list trivia”.

You can also specify what size channels you want it to return using -min and -max which both take a number argument.

For example, “/list -min 50 trivia music” would list all channels with ‘music’ and ‘trivia’ in them, which have at least 50 users in them.

We’re working on ways to make finding good places to chat even easier, so stay tuned for announcements in the next few weeks.

We’ve also rolled out a new version of the widgetmanager at http://widgetmanager.mibbit.com , with new skins, easier to use interface and instant preview of your widget. Please do let us know if you have any problems at all integrating your widget on your website. We are here to help

-axod