About BitlBee
BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It's a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don't want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.
BitlBee currently supports the following IM networks/protocols: XMPP/Jabber (including Google Talk), MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and ICQ.
How to use it?
Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get the program working.
As soon as you get your accounts working, you can add users to your contact list and talk to them, just like you normally do on IRC. Open a query, talk to the person in the channel, or even talk to them in groupchats that will look to you like just another IRC channel.
If you don't want to (or can't) install BitlBee on your own machine you can also use one of the public servers. If you use Windows, this is the preferred option, as the Win32 port isn't very reliable yet.
im.bitlbee.org stability issues
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
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
"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
Just another development snapshot, mainly for the people who like Jabber chatrooms but don't like bzr. :-)
Skype support
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!