BitlBee - News

Happy birthday, BitlBee 1.2.1!

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:54:06 +0100

Today (on my watch this day is going to end in five minutes already, actually..) BitlBee reached the age of six years! Since it's been a while since the 1.2 release and since there are fixes for a lot of bugs in bzr by now, I decided to make this a release.

This code is running on testing for a while already, with not too many changes, and it's extremely stable. For the first time, we're actually running BitlBee in daemon mode for all SSL connections. It's serving thirty users from just one process, running without any issues for weeks in a row. This is quite an improvement over the unstable unreliable program the Bee once used to be!

Of course I'm not saying that the program is perfect now, please keep sending those bug reports. :-) But first, enjoy BitlBee 1.2.1!

im.bitlbee.org stability issues

Mon, 05 May 2008 21:47:17 -0700

Over the last month, we had some problems with the machine that hosts im.bitlbee.org. It looks like the machine doesn't have enough RAM to be a mail- and webserver and also have hundreds of BitlBee processes running. From time to time, it was necessary to kill some BitlBee processes to free some RAM.

In the next few days the machine will get a memory upgrade, we're quite sure that this will solve this problem. This means that the server is going to be down for about an hour this week, but after that, it will hopefully run perfectly again without any interruptions.

Update (2008-05-06 15:41 (UTC)): The memory was upgraded successfully with only around twenty minutes downtime. We're quite confident that all stability issues are over now.

Account cleanup on im.bitlbee.org

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:08:44 +0000

Now that the main public server is running BitlBee version 1.2, I had to do a little cleanup there. One of the changes between 1.2 and older versions is that BitlBee is no longer case sensitive about your username. In other words, previously there could be two accounts, "Peter" and "peter". From version 1.2, this isn't possible anymore, it doesn't matter if you log in as "Peter" or "peter", it will always be the same account.

There is one problem in this transition: There were many "double" accounts on the server. Sometimes more than just doubles ("Peter", "peter" and "PETER"). Only one of those accounts could stay. I tried to keep the accounts that were used the most recently and remove the other versions. So if you can't log in on im.bitlbee.org anymore and your nickname may not be unique, this could be the reason.

Our apologies for this inconvenience, there's no good way to solve this without some damage. However, there are backups, so just join #bitlbee or send a mail, and your account can be restored with a different name. Nothing should be lost permanently.

BitlBee 1.2 is Bitl

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:54:05 +0000

"I CAN HAS SPEEECH?" This is how Wilmer announced to me that he was going to do another BitlBee release. I was as surprised as you are. I thought he had given up on this whole releasing business.

BitlBee 1.1.1dev

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:31:32 +0000

Just another development snapshot, mainly for the people who like Jabber chatrooms but don't like bzr. :-)

Skype support

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:05:23 +0100

For the first time in almost five years, there's a new protocol supported by BitlBee! If you want to talk to people on Skype, that's now possible. See the Skype ticket in the bug tracker. Thanks a lot to vmiklos for all the work! Note that this isn't integrated in BitlBee and probably won't ever be integrated because it depends on an external Skype instance and a proxy daemon. However, the plugin should work just as well as any built-in protocol, and no patching is required!