So – a few of our users have reported problems logging into Olark and hab.la (for older users) with the most recent edition of pidgin (2.6.1 and 2.6.0).

If you are using pidgin, and your connection to Olark is hanging, it is probably because of this problem.

There’s even a bug report filed at: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9956.

As far as we can tell the latest version of pidgin (2.6.1) is requiring SRV records. Rather than just ignoring SRV records if they don’t exit.

One of our customers has reported that you can fix this problem by copying over libpurple.dll. http://www.olark.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=576

In addition we have added SRV records to olark.com and hab.la. Which should solve this problem for good as soon as your DNS is updated.

If you run a jabber server, and your customers are having trouble connecting to it with the latest version of pidgin. I recommend that you set the SRV records on your domain. I found: http://www.jms1.net/jabberd2/srv.shtml to be a great guide for generating jabber SRV records.

I pushed out some code tonight that replaces the previous idle monitoring, and improves monitoring for the few occasions when Gtalk does not tell us that a user has logged off.

Included in this push should be some improvements to the caching of various parts of Hab.la live chat, which should primarily make it easier to signup for hab.la when you go through the wizard out of order.

The whole team attended TECH cocktails Ann Arbor last Friday, I am sure we’ll have an update for you soon about that. There are a bunch of exciting things going on here. We’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been trying to replicate the Hab.la experience on AIM and on MSN since around July of 2008. Today, after working on this problem off and on for far too many months, improving the existing pure python libraries for OSCAR (AIM’s protocol) and MSN, and finally rewriting everything using libpurple (the brains behind meebo, pidgin, adium, and finch). I have to admit defeat (at least in the short run).

It appears that the rate limiting on both MSN and AIM, makes it far too unreliable to try to build a bot, that sends a high number of status messages to the AIM and MSN servers (key to some of the protocol hacks I needed to make it work). After trying a lot of hacks, and getting everything working for small numbers of concurrent users, I’ve decided to stop bringing webusers online and offline as visitors come to your website – I could not stand behind the reliability of the service. From now on MSN and AIM users will have access to a limited version of Hab.la where they will not be able to easily initiate conversations with visitors to their websites. Although, their visitors will have no problem initiating conversations with them, and operators can still attempt to follow particular users by sending the message “/follow” to a webuser buddy on their buddylist.

We may add a few other modes of use for these protocols to make it easier to initiate conversations in the future, or bring back the old method if we can decrease our MSN or AIM ratelimit effectively, but this is unlikely to be a high priority in the near future.

We continue to recommend either connecting to Hab.la directly using a Jabber(XMPP) client. Or using Hab.la with an existing Gtalk or Jabber client. You will be able to take advantage of all of Hab.la’s features with either of these two approaches. Most notably: monitor visitor location on a website and initiate conversations directly with these visitors.

Astute users may have noticed that we very quietly rolled out a new feature last week: Hab.la now works directly with your existing Google Talk account. Here’s how to add Google Talk to Hab.la.

First, log in to Hab.la and go to the account settings panel. You’ll notice a new section for “Other Chat Networks”.

Click on the “Google Talk” link and add your Gmail address. Then press “Save.”

GTalk will now show up as active.

Now log in to Google Talk. Hab.la will send you some chat invitations over the next few minutes. Approve each one by clicking “yes.”

That’s it. Now, when you’re signed in to Google Talk, visitors to your web site will be able to chat with exactly as they can with your regular Hab.la account. In addition, any other Jabber-based chat network that supports the server-to-server protocol (“S2S”) will work in the exact same manner.

We’re working on connecting more big chat networks with Hab.la, but each one has its own quirks. Look for more options in the coming months.

Last night we pushed out some server configuration changes that you will be hearing about soon.

The first of these changes was to enable SSL support for authentication on the Hab.la servers. Some clients require SSL authentication, and we thought it was a good time to roll out SSL support for our Jabber transactions.

This caused errors for some of our clients, because we were using a Self-Signed SSL certificate. I.e. everything was still secure, except we weren’t paying our ‘TAX’ to the SSL cartel. We remedied this problem a few minute ago by buying a SSL certificate for the jabber server.

So everything should be golden for those of you using clients that complain about self-signed SSL certificates.

Hey guys, I thought this bug fix warranted a blog post. So as a few of you have noticed, using some clients the webuser was getting kicked off whenever the operator used a non-ascii character. The webusers were able to use non-ASCII characters fine, but the operators were being restricted to ASCII.

This problem is at least partially fixed (in that I am unable to reproduce it), but there may still be issues. Essentially our logging system was setup in a way that didn’t support logging messages containing international characters – so whenever the system stopped to log a harmless error message, it was crashing the chat session.

I’ve implemented a good first pass of a fix, but I have a feeling there are a few race conditions that could still occur. In any case, I’d consider it completely beta worthy :-)

-Ben

Another boring update for you hab.la fans. We have made some backend tweaks to the RPC server which should slightly speed up Hab.la (for end users) and reduce the amount of memory and CPU used for each site (which will help us better scale hab.la as traffic increases).

We’ve also fixed a few small bugs with operator availability that should speed up the load time for the initial hab.la window.

Hope everyone is having a great New Year

-Ben

The new backend jabber server is here, and let’s just say that I did the final push while using GRPS over AT&T, while sitting at a few airports, VIM is amazing on a low bandwidth connection. [Actually it’s amazing all the time, but I digress.]

Now that the new backend is up I’ll have some time for the smaller tweaks I had been putting off.

Happy Holiday from Hab.la :-)

Oh yea.. and if you run into any bugs or problems with the server, let me know ASAP. I did pretty extensive testing, but it’s not too hard to miss something here and there.

A few of our users have requested that we provide another port to access hab.la on. We actually implemented the code mid last week, but didn’t push it to production until today.

Corporate friends you can now access the hab.la Jabber server on port 21. So, your server configuration should look like:

username: user@hab.la

password: _ you should know this _

server: hab.la

port: 21

Let me know if you need further instructions.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes from our users:

“I’m impressed - I didn’t think after using 37Signals apps anything would impress me. But you guys did a good job on this.” - Anonymous

“This is just exactly What I needed . Plugoo was flash based and too heavy. Great Job!” - Michel, France , Marseille

“It’s a great way to interact with other people on web pages.” - Anonymous

“Thanks very much for putting the time into this. its very easy to use and its much better for people that don’t need all those complicated chat systems. As soon as I put it up, I had users asking questions all day it really helped me improve the site, because I got to talk to customers on the website directly. our customers are people who don’t use computers too often so its very simple for them to use.” - Dentfix.com

“its a real cool function.. better than a java chat on the website… so i can use my pidgin to chat directly if a user visits my website… thx for this great tool” - Moff, http://houserocker.tk

I think I’ll make a tradition of occasionally posting some of the feedback from our feedback form. (if you include a link, and your comment doesn’t look like obvious spam, I’ll try to include it) Thanks for your support guys, your feedback is what keeps Hab.la moving :-)

Let us know what you think

So, we have only confirmed that this feature works with adium, pidgin, and meebo. (All libpurple based chat clients).

However, it has worked consistently for us. If you want to play with this feature visit your website and type: /nick nickname into the chat box, the name of the buddy representing you on your buddylist should change from webuser### to nickname.

We are close to adding an interface element to let user’s specify this option on their own.