Chat not working - OFTC has banned Mibbit

[jvassie]

Not much to do to the subject title really, looks like OFTC irc network has banned connections from Mibbit - so for the moment people will have to connect from a seperate client such as mIRC or xChat

[orudge]

OFTC has a web chat feature of its own. It looks like I may have to switch over to that.

[SwissFan91]

Not much to do to the subject title really, looks like OFTC irc network has banned connections from Mibbit - so for the moment people will have to connect from a seperate client such as mIRC or xChat

I can confirm that it has been happening for around a month, I think.

[kamnet]

I've e-mailed them my displeasure over banning a good web-based client in favor of an inferior one. I'd rather use an IRC server that was truly "open" an "free".

[jonty-comp]

To be fair, I don't blame them at all - Mibbit is probably the most abused facility on IRC these days. You can tell exactly what's about to happen whenever someone with a nickname of "Guest1234" joins #tycoon...

[kamnet]

I did get a response, and it looks like they're (possibly, fairly) putting the blame on Mibbit for not cooperating faster.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin,

We're sorry that you feel this way, and hope that one day you'll understand why we made the choices we did. Here's a little more context so you're aware of the full situation.

It was becoming increasingly difficult for OFTC to provide a quality experience for those using Mibbit, as abuse by a single user would often lead to an outage for significant swaths of Mibbit users. Simultaneously Mibbit wasn't able to keep up with the block list for preventing tor exit nodes from using their service, which compounded the outages Mibbit users would experience.

OFTC needed a mechanism to cut down on abuse to provide a quality experience for everyone else using OFTC legitimately. Mibbit wanted us to enable the WEBIRC command for their exit nodes. This requires OFTC to give Mibbit a free pass to tell us how someone is connecting to OFTC via Mibbit. This was not a satisfactory solution, and for a few years we've discussed among ourselves and with Mibbit alternative solutions.

OFTC finally arrived at a solution that we thought was a workable for everyone. OFTC would enable a socket.io listener on its servers exposing raw IRC to web clients, removing the middle man between consumers of web clients and OFTC itself. The down side of this would require some engineering work to be done on Mibbits end. On the plus side, anyone and everyone can create the web ui that they prefer without having to provide a server side mechanism to connect to OFTC, or without having to get permission beforehand.

Users are not necessarily forced to use our modified qwebirc, it's just that there hasn't been another implementation of the web client done.

The decision to ban Mibbit exit nodes was not taken lightly, and wasn't unilateral. We communicated with Mibbit our intentions, and negotiated a date that would provide them time to do the engineering work for a seamless experience for its users. That date came and went, and Mibbit had not done the work to move to the new system.

We hope that Mibbit will one day do the work to connect to OFTC, and we sincerely hope that when that day comes you'll consider using our network again.

Thanks for your consideration

tjfontaine

[FLHerne]

Bump - it's been over a year now, and the chat is still broken.

If it can't be simply fixed, it might be worth removing the 'Chat' button altogether and just providing a list of relevant channels with a link to OFTC's webclient?

[kamnet]

The chat is not broken. As much as I don't like it, this is a decision made entirely by Mibbit to not work with OFTC.

Select another IRC client from your browser, Chatzilla works great. A stand-alone client like mIRC also works just fine.

[FLHerne]

The chat is not broken. As much as I don't like it, this is a decision made entirely by Mibbit to not work with OFTC.
Select another IRC client from your browser, Chatzilla works great. A stand-alone client like mIRC also works just fine.

I use Konversation, and never really used the Mibbit interface. It's not a problem for me personally.

My point is that the forum embeds a Mibbit widget and links to it from every page; that's a pretty strong endorsement of it, and so when it consistently fails (in a rather non-obvious manner, to boot) it's frustrating or confusing to newbies. I got a couple of PMs about it yesterday (for some reason?), hence remembering this was a thing.

These people don't care that the IRC channel itself works fine, or even know what IRC is. They just know that the big 'Chat' button at the top of the forum inexplicably says they're banned rather than letting them chat. From any reasonable, non-technical perspective that counts as 'broken', even though the channel can be accessed by other means.

Since there's no reason to think the embedded Mibbit widget will ever work, it should be replaced or the prominent link to it removed. Directing users to something that's known-broken is a bad idea.

[keoz]

The chat is not broken. As much as I don't like it, this is a decision made entirely by Mibbit to not work with OFTC.
Select another IRC client from your browser, Chatzilla works great. A stand-alone client like mIRC also works just fine.

I use Konversation, and never really used the Mibbit interface. It's not a problem for me personally.

My point is that the forum embeds a Mibbit widget and links to it from every page; that's a pretty strong endorsement of it, and so when it consistently fails (in a rather non-obvious manner, to boot) it's frustrating or confusing to newbies. I got a couple of PMs about it yesterday (for some reason?), hence remembering this was a thing.

These people don't care that the IRC channel itself works fine, or even know what IRC is. They just know that the big 'Chat' button at the top of the forum inexplicably says they're banned rather than letting them chat. From any reasonable, non-technical perspective that counts as 'broken', even though the channel can be accessed by other means.

Since there's no reason to think the embedded Mibbit widget will ever work, it should be replaced or the prominent link to it removed. Directing users to something that's known-broken is a bad idea.

Something clean would be sending to some page explaining how to connect using a real IRC client (and eventually giving advices about some of them), and not some web intermediary. IRC is IRC, and for this, there is real IRC software. Webclients are basically an improper - and really dirty - way to go there (this Mibbit story is just one more perfect proof of that). mIRC, Konversation, Xchat, weechat, irssi. The stuff is there.

[kamnet]

My point is that the forum embeds a Mibbit widget and links to it from every page; that's a pretty strong endorsement of it, and so when it consistently fails (in a rather non-obvious manner, to boot) it's frustrating or confusing to newbies. I got a couple of PMs about it yesterday (for some reason?), hence remembering this was a thing. Since there's no reason to think the embedded Mibbit widget will ever work, it should be replaced or the prominent link to it removed. Directing users to something that's known-broken is a bad idea.

Oh, DOH! I forgot about the embedded page on the forums here. I thought you were talking about the link on OpenTTD.org. Yeah that probably does need fixed, sometime after Owen gets back from his honeymoon.

[Alberth]

oftc provides their own web chat, perhaps that is a useful replacement?

http://www.oftc.net/WebChat/

A real client is perhaps the better solution, but lots of people don't have that installed.

[orudge]

With HTML5 being what it is these days, I can probably switch it over to some sort of HTML5-based web IRC client. Time, as always, is the issue. I'll try to remember to look at it tonight!

[GunChleoc]

Maybe you can steal some widget/code ideas from here: https://wl.widelands.org/webchat/

[FLHerne]

Bump.

[Nawdic]

For what? Chat on here. For what its worth actually, the amount of times I've used the chat it has been dead apart from one time.

[Alberth]

Having a chat button to a non-working chat does not make much sense. It could even be the reason there are so few people.

[Leanden]

Any update on getting this bad boy fixed?

[orudge]

Subject to me having finished painting Olivia's room, I will try to actually look at this tonight. Sorry!

[orudge]

Or possibly tomorrow night, now. Sorry. But Olivia's bedroom is looking good. (She wanted it pink.)