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.

Related posts:

1. New features, updates, bug fixes, etc
2. Turns out sort() is slow in javascript.
3. Some UI updates
4. A few updates
5. Widget connects to any server